

Book ,..Sl 74 -| }" 


Goipght}^?_ 


COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 




p 


• t 


V 




#• % 

4 » • >-rt' ./ 


. •*-. 


.•♦ / 


i, ,. 





i 








• / • ^ 
• . > . 


t 


I 


» 


I 


I. 





> 
# t 



/ 

I 





; t 





• » 


t.rij 


' >s 


1 

i • 


» » » . .- 


• 1 



*► « 

-*. fc ’ ^ 

> . • 





• L 


, » 


u 




• < • 




1 



Held for Orders 


c 


9 

i 


) 








Held for Orders 

Being 

Stories of Railroad Life 

By / ■ 

Frank H. Spearman 





New York 

McCLURE, PHILLIPS 
& COMPANY 

MCMI 


TWF I :bf.arv of 

C( 'J'-.Ress. 

Two Co>"ta ftECfelV€D 

OCT. 25 190' 

COPvmOHT ENTRY 

CLASS* a. XXc. No. 

/ ^ i./- ^ 

COPY JS JS» 




Copyright, 1900, by S. S. McClure Co. 
1901, BY McClure, Phillips Gf Co. 


To 

Sloi^n (francig CorDeal 


4 


Contents 


THE SWITCHMAN’S STORY 

Page 

Shockley i 

THE WIPER’S STORY 

How McGrath got an Engine ... 39 

THE ROADMASTER’S STORY 
The Spider Water 63 

THE STRIKER’S STORY 
McTerza 107 

THE DESPATCHER’S STORY 
The Last Order 141 

THE NIGHTMAN’S STORY 
Bullhead 181 


viii Contents 

THE MASTER MECHANIC’S STORY 

Page 


Delaroo 209 

THE OPERATOR’S STORY 
De Molay Four 247 

THE TRAINMASTER’S STORY 
Of the Old Guard 293 

THE YELLOW MAIL STORY 
Jimmie the Wind 327 

I 


Illustrations 


I. Shockley Frontispiece 

Facing Page 

II. Chris 21 

III. Cooney 39 ^ 

IV. Hailey 63 

V. McTerza 107 

VI. Old Man Nicholson . . . 132 

VII. Dave Hawk 293 

VIII. Jimmie the Wind . . . . 327 



Held for Orders 

¥■ 

The Switchman’s Story 


SHOCKLEY 












■0^ ,: :'".rmr''^m: -I 


>v. 


Ivi: 


■t*i 


r( ^(r»> 


LW":. 


li. 


'>>V 






'0 • ♦ 


m 


'IV' 


Ti » 


4> V» 




A I 


'-K*- ' 


11*.* 




14’ 


o 


t^n 


r' 


V.iw 




> g/! 








» k* 




s*- 


* -/• 


A - 


ti 




ft 




^ A ^ 




‘ 1' 


» 1 ^ f ^ 


fO < 


tecs- 


1 %♦ 


t/ 


A 


X.' 


t 1 


»' 


A*')7- 


4 *1 
1 ■»* 




■r 










I t 




.* ■« 


1% 


» . ^ 






l' '*] 


ifj 


«A ^ 


ri* 




^1 




/ >/ 










It 


» > 


i.l 


? > L, ’IS. 


* H 


.*r 


[» *%- 




i* 


>rs 


f >m// 




V 


• . *' 


\ 


» il \ 


'• % 4 


i' 




■ff/ 


' *•, -, . A '. ,:v v1ry7/ '« 

* • - • . •/ • .‘ 0 /V'‘ 

H - A ■ ■*• '■■B 


r •♦ 


M 


i» 1 ^ 




•t •' 


* i\ 


,jKi 


• # 








^.'; vrp 


a 


f ' ' 
i'Wr*' <f ^ 


1, ? 


1 










*"♦ I 


VJ 




f < 


.’•.* i 


V 








iviS 




t ns 


V'}' 




4 




^ V 


> T 


■'fii' ■ ' '• ^ 


1 . 




MV 




4 ra \1tX . W**! /. . . * i V i S 


'it 


1 k I • 


• ) v 






I 


*r 






»< 






Jl^ 


ic 




iiSveC' 4 Avf?* 


It 




3?’ 


A 


iri 


£i 


I ♦i 










N t 


A?: 


[| ^i«l 






Ltl' 





The Switchman’s Story 

SHOCKLEY 

H e ’s rather a bad lot, I guess,” wrote Bucks 
to Callahan, “ but I am satisfied of one 
thing — you can't run that yard with a 
Sunday-school superintendent. He won't make you 
any trouble unless he gets to drinking. If that 
happens, don^t have any words with himJ* Bucks 
underscored three times. ‘‘Simply crawl into a 
cyclone cellar and wire me. Sending you eighteen 
loads of steel to-night, and six cars of ties. Blair 
reports section ib ready for track layers and Mear’s 
outfit moving into the Palisade Canon. Push the 
stuff to the front.'' 

It was getting dark, and Callahan sat in that part 
of the Benkleton depot he called the office, pulling 

3 


Held for Orders 


4 

at a muddy root that went unaccountably hot in 
sudden flashes. He took the pipe from his mouth, 
leaving his foot on the table, and looked at the bowl 
resentfully, wondering again if there could be pow- 
der in that infernal tobacco of Rubedo’s. The mouth- 
piece he eyed as a desperate man might ponder a, 
final shift. 

The pipe had originally come from God's Coun- 
try, with a Beautiful Amber Mouthpiece, and a Beau- 
tiful Bowl ; but it was a present from his sister and 
had been bought at a dry-goods store. Once when 
thinking — or, if you please, when not thinking — 
Callahan had held a lighted match to the Beautiful 
Amber Mouthpiece instead of to the tobacco, and 
in the fire that ensued they had hard work to save 
the depot. 

Callahan never wrote his sister about it; he 
thought only about buying pipes at dry-goods stores, 
and about being, when they exploded, a thousand 
miles from the man who sold them. There was 
plenty in that to think about. What he now brought 
his teeth reluctantly together on was part of the rub- 


The Switchman’s Story 5 

ber tube of a dismantled atomizer; in happier post- 
Christmas days a toilet fixture. But Callahan had 
abandoned the use of bay rum after shaving. His 
razor had gone to the scrap and on Sunday morn- 
ings he merely ran a pair of scissors over the high 
joints — for Callahan was railroading — and on the 
front. 

After losing the mouthpiece he would have been 
completely in the air but for little Chris Oxen. 
Chris was Callahan’s section gang. His name was 
once Ochsner, but that wasn’t in Benkleton. Cal- 
lahan was hurried when he made up the pay roll and 
put it Oxen, as being better United States. I say 
United States because Callahan said United States, 
in preference to English. 

Chris had been in America only three years ; but 
he had been in Russia three hundred, and in that 
time had learned many ways of getting something 
out of nothing. When the red-haired despatcher 
after the explosion cast away with bitterness the 
remains of the pipe, Chris picked it up and by 
judicious action on the atomizer figured out a new 


6 


Held for Orders 


mouthpiece no worse than the original, for while 
the second, like the first, was of rubber, it was not 
of the explosive variety. 

Chris presented the remodelled root to Callahan as 
a surprise ; Callahan, in a burst of gratitude, pro- 
moted him on the spot : he made little Chris fore- 
man. It did n’t bring any advance in pay — but 
there was the honor. To be foreman was an 
honor, and as little Chris was the only man on the 
yard force, he became, by promotion, foreman of 
himself. 

So Callahan sat thinking of the ingenuity of Chris, 
reflecting on the sting of construction tobacco, and 
studying over Bucks’s letter. 

The yard was his worry. Not that it was much 
of a yard; just a dozen runs off the lead to take 
the construction material for Callahan to distribute, 
fast as the grade was pushed westward. The trou- 
ble at the Benkleton yard came from without, not 
from within. 

The road was being pushed into the cattle country, 
and it was all easy till they struck Benkleton. Ben- 


The Switchman’s Story 7 

kleton was just a hard knot on the Yellow Grass 
trail : a squally, sandy cattle town. There were 
some bad men in Benkleton; they didn’t bother 
often. But there were some men in Benkleton 
who thought they were bad, and these were 
a source of constant bedevilment to the railroad 
men. 

Southwest of the yard, where the river breaks 
sheer into the bottoms, there hived and still hives a 
colony of railroad laborers, Russians. They have 
squatted there, burrowed into the face of the bench 
like sand swallows, and scraped caves out for them- 
selves, and the name of the place is Little Russia. 

This was in the troublous days, when the cowboys, 
homesick for evil, would ride around Little Russia 
with rope and gun, and scare the pioneers cross-eyed. 
The cattle fellows spent the entire winter months, 
all sand and sunshine, putting up schemes to worry 
Callahan and the Little Russians. The headquar- 
ters for this restless gangVere at Pat Barlie’s place, 
across from the post office ; it was there that the 
cowboys loved to congregate. To Callahan, Pat 


8 


Held for Orders 


Barlie’s place was a wasps’ nest; but to Chris, it 
was a den of wolves — and of a dreader sort than 
Russian wolves, for Barlie’s pack never slept. 

The east and west section men could run away 
from them on hand cars; it was the yardmen who 
caught it, and* it grew so bad they could n’t keep 
a switchman. About ten o’clock at night, after 
Number Twenty-three had pulled in and they were 
distributing a trainload of bridge timber, a switch- 
man’s lantern would go up in signal, when pist ! a 
bullet would knock the lamp clean out of his hand, 
and the nerve clean out of his head. Handling a 
light in the Benkleton yard was like smoking a cel- 
luloid pipe — you never could tell when it would 
go off. 

Cowboys shot away the lamps faster than requisi- 
tions could be drawn for new ones. They shot the 
signals off the switches, and the lights from the tops • 
of moving trains. Whenever a brakeman showed 
a flicker, two cowboys stood waiting to snuff it. 

If they missed the lamp, they winged the brakeman. 

It compelled Bucks after awhile to run trains through 


The Switchman’s Story 9 

Benkleton without showing ever a light. This, 
though tough, could be managed, but to shunt flats 
in the yard at night with no light, or to get a switch- 
man willing to play young Tell to Peg Leg Rey- 
nolds’s William for any length of time, was impossible. 
At last Bucks, on whom the worry reflected at head- 
quarters, swore he would fight them with fire, and 
he sent Shockley. Callahan still sat speculating 
on what he would be up against when Shockley 
arrived. 

The impression Bucks’s letter gave him — know- 
ing Bucks to be frugal of words — was that Shockley 
would rise up with cartridges in his ears and bowie 
knives dangling from his watch chain. To live in 
fear of the cowboys was one thing; but to live in 
fear of the cowboys on the one hand, and in ter- 
ror of a yard master on the other, seemed, all things 
considered, confusing, particularly if the new ally 
got to drinking and his fire scattered. Just then 
train Fifty-nine whistled. Pat Barlie’s corner began 
to sputter its salute. Callahan shifted around behind 
his bombproof, lit his powder horn, and looking 


lO 


Held for Orders 


down the line wondered whether Shockley might 
be on that train. 

It was not till the next night though that a tall, 
thinnish chap, without visible reasons for alighting, 
got off P'ifty-nine and walked tentatively down the 
platform. At the ticket office he asked for the as- 
sistant superintendent. 

Out there on the platform talking to the con- 
ductor.” 

The thin fellow emerged and headed for Callahan. 
Callahan noticed only his light, springy amble and his 
hatchet face. 

“ Mr. Callahan ? ” 

“ Yes.” 

‘‘ Bucks sent me up — to take the yard.” 

“ What 's your name ? ” 

“ Shockley.” 

“ Step upstairs. I ’ll be up in a minute.” 

Shockley walked back into the depot but he left the 
copper-haired assistant superintendent uncertain as 
to whether it was really over ; whether Shockley had 
actually arrived or not. As Callahan studied the 


The Switchman’s Story 1 1 

claimant’s inoffensive appearance, walking away, he 
rather thought it could n’t be over, or that Bucks was 
mistaken ; but Bucks never made a mistake. 

Next morning at seven, the new yard master took 
hold. Callahan had intimated that the night air in 
the yard, it being low land, was miasmatic, and that 
Shockley had maybe better try for a while to do his 
switching in the daytime. J ust before the appointed 
hour in the morning, the assistant had looked out on 
his unlucky yard ; he thought to himself that if that 
yard did n’t drive a man to drink nothing ever would. 
Piled shanty high with a bewildering array of mate- 
rial, it was enough to take the heart out of a Denver 
switching crew. 

While he stood at the window he saw their plug 
switch engine, that had been kicked out of every 
other yard on the system, wheeze out of the round- 
house, saw the new yard master flirt his hand at the 
engineer, and swing up on the footboard. But the 
swing — it made Callahan’s heart warm to him. Not 
the lubberly jump of the hoboes that had worried the 
life out of him all summer, even when the cattlemen 


12 


Held for Orders 


did n’t bother. It was the swing of the sailor into 
the shrouds, of the Cossack into the saddle, of the 
yacht into the wind. It was like falling down or 
falling up or falling on — the grace of a mastery of 
gravitation — that was Shockley’s swing on the foot- 
board of the yard engine as it shot snorting past him. 

“He’s all right,” iriuttered Callahan. It was 
enough. 

A man who flipped a tender like that was not like 
to go very wrong even in that chaos of rails and 
ties and stringers and coal. 

“ Now,” continued Callahan to himself, timidly 
hopeful, “ if the cuss only does n’t get to drinking ! ” 
He watched apprehensively, dreading the first time 
he should see him entering Pat Barlie’s place, but 
Shockley did n’t appear to know Pat had a place. 
The cowboys, too, watched him, waiting for his 
lamp to gleam at night down in the yard, but their 
patience was strained for a long time. Shockley got 
all his work done by daylight. 

To the surprise of Callahan, and probably on the 
principle of the watched pot, the whole winter went 


The Switchman’s Story 1 3 

without a brush between Shockley and the cowboys. 
Even Peg Leg Reynolds let him alone. “ He ’s the 
luckiest fellow on earth,” remarked Callahan one day 
at McCloud in reply to a question from Bucks about 
Shockley. “ There has n’t a shot been fired at him 
all winter.” 

“ He was n’t always lucky,” commented Bucks, 
signing a batch of letters. 

“•He came from Chicago,” Bucks went on, after 
a silence. “ He was switching there on the ^ QJ at 
the time of the stock-yards riots. Shockley used to 
drink like a pirate. I never knew just the right of 
it. I understood it was in a brawl — anyway, he 
killed a man there; shot him, and had to get away 
in a hurry. I was train master. Shockley was a 
striker; but I’d always found him decent, and 
when his wife came to me about it I helped 
her out a little; she’s dead since. His record 
isn’t just right back there yet. There’s some- 
thing about the shooting hanging over him. I 
never set eyes on the fellow again till he struck 
me for a job at McCloud ; then I sent him up to 


Held for Orders 


H 

you. He claimed he M quit drinking — guess he 
had. Long as he ’s behaving himself I believe in 
giving him a chance — h’m? ” 

It really was n’t any longer a case of giving him a 
chance ; rather of whether they could get on without 
him^ When the Colorado Pacific began racing us 
into Denver that summer, it began to crowd even 
Shockley to keep the yard clean ; he saw he would 
have to have help. 

“ Chris, what do they give you for tinkering up 
the ties ? ” asked Shockley one day. 

^ “ Dollar an’ a half.” 

“Why don’t you take hold switching with me 
and get three dollars ? ” 

Chris was thunderstruck. First he said Callahan 
would n’t let him, but Shockley “ guessed yes.” 
Then Chris figured. To save the last of the hun- 
dred dollars necessary to get the woman and the 
babies over — it could be done in three months in- 
stead of six, if only Callahan would listen. But when 
Shockley talked Callahan always listened, and when 
he asked for a new switchman he got- him. And 


The Switchman’s Story 1 5 

Chris got his three ; to him a sum unspeakable. 
By the time the woman and the children arrived in 
the fall, Chris would have died for Shockley. 

The fall that saw the woman and the stunted 
subjects of the Czar stowed away under the bench 
in Little Russia brought also the cowboys down from 
Montana to bait the Russians. 

One stormy night, when Chris thought it was per- 
fectly safe to venture up to Rubedo’s after groceries, 
the cowboys caught him and dragged him over to 
Pat Barlie’s. 

It was seven when they caught him, and by nine 
they had put him through every pace that civiliza- 
tion could suggest. Peg Leg Reynolds, as always, 
master of ceremonies, then ordered him tied to the 
stove. When it was done, the cowboys got into 
a big circle for a dance. The fur on Chris’s coat 
had already begun to sizzle, when the front door 
opened. Shockley walked in. 

Straight, in his ambling, hurried way, he walked 
past the deserted bar through the ring of cowboys at 
the rear to Chris frying against the stove, and began 


i6 


Held for Orders 


cutting him loose. Through every knot that his 
knife slit he sent a very loud and very bad word, and 
no sooner had he freed Chris than he jerked him by 
the collar, as if quarreling with him, toward the 
back door, which was handy, and before the cow- 
boys got wind he had shoved him through it. 

“ Hold on there ! ” cried Peg Leg Reynolds, 
when it was just too late. Chris was out of it, 
and Shockley turned alone. 

“All right, partner; what is it ? ” he asked amiably. 

“You’ve got a ripping nerve.” 

“ I know it.” 

“ What ’s your name ? ” 

“ Shockley.” 

“ Can you dance ? ” 

“ No.” 

It was Peg Leg’s opportunity. He drew his gun. 
“ I reckon maybe you can. Try it,” he added, point- 
ing the suggestion with the pistol. Shockley looked 
foolish ; he did n’t begin tripping soon enough, and 
a bullet from the cowboy’s gun splintered the base- 
board at his feet. Shockley attempted to shuffle. 


The Switchman’s Story 17 

To any one who did n’t know him it looked funny. 
But Peg Leg was a rough dancing master, and 
before he said enough an ordinary man would have 
dropped exhausted. Shockley, breathing a good bit 
quicker, only steadied himself against the bar. 

“ Take off your hat before gentlemen,” cried the 
cowboy. Shockley hesitated, but he did pull off 
his cap. 

“ That ’s more like it. What ’s your name ? ” 

“ Shockley.” 

“ Shockley ? ” echoed Reynolds with a burst of 
range amenities. “ Well, Shockley, you can’t help 
your name. Drink for once in your life with a man 
of breeding — my name’s Reynolds. Pat, set out 
the good bottle — this guy pays,” exclaimed Peg 
Leg, wheeling to the bar. 

“ What ’ll it be ? ” asked Pat Barlie of Shockley, 
as he deftly slid a row of glasses in front of the men 
of breeding. 

“ Ginger ale for me,” suggested Shockley mildly. 
The cowboys put up a single yell. Ginger ale ! 
It was too funny. 

2 


i8 


Held for Orders 


Reynolds, choking with contempt, pointed to the 
yard master’s glass. “ Fill it with whiskey,” he 
shouted. “Fill it, Pat ! ” he repeated, as Shockley 
leaned undecidedly against the bar. The yard 
master held out the glass, and the bar keeper began 
to pour. Shockley looked at the liquor a moment ; 
then he looked at Reynolds, who fronted him gun 
in one hand and red water in the other. 

“ Drink ! ” 

Shockley paused, looked again at the whiskey and 
drew the glass towards him with the curving hand 
of a drinker. “You want me to drink this? ” he 
half laughed, turning on his baiter. 

“I didn’t say so, did I? 1 said DRINK!” 
roared Peg Leg. 

Everybody looked at Shockley. He stood finger- 
ing the glass quietly. Somehow everybody, drunk 
or sober, looked at Shockley. He glanced around 
at the crowd; other guns were creeping from their 
holsters. He pushed the glass back, smiling. 

“ I don’t drink whiskey, partner,” said Shockley 
gently. 


The Switchman’s Story 19 

‘‘You’ll drink that whiskey, or I’ll put a little 
hole into you ! ” 

Shockley reached good-naturedly for the glass, 
threw the liquor on the floor, and set it back on the bar. 

“ Go on ! ” said Shockley. It confused Reynolds. 

“ A man that ’ll waste good whiskey ought n’t t’ 
live, anyhow,” he muttered, fingering his revolver 
nervously. “You’ve spoiled my aim. Throw 
up your hat,” he yelled. “ I ’ll put a hole through 
that to begin with.” 

Instead, Shockley put his cap back on his head. 

“ Put a hole through it there,” said he. Reynolds 
set down his glass, and Shockley waited ; it was the 
cowboy who hesitated. 

“ Where ’s your nerve ” asked the railroad man. 
The gun covered him with a flash and a roar. 
Reynolds, whatever his faults, was a shot. His 
bullet cut cleanly through the crown, and the pow- 
der almost burnt Shockley’s face. The switchman 
recovered himself instantly, and taking olF his cap 
laughed as he examined the hole. 

“ Done with me ? ” he asked evenly, cap in hand. 


20 


Held for Orders 


Peg Leg drained his glass before he spoke. “ Get 
out ! ” he snapped. The switchman started on the 
word for tlie front door. When he opened it, 
everybody laughed — but Shockley. 

Maybe an hour later Reynolds was sitting back of 
the stove in a card game, when a voice spoke at 
his ear. “ Get up ! ” Reynolds looked around into 
a pistol; behind it stood Shockley, pleasant. “Get 
up ! ” he repeated. Nobody had seen him come in ; 
but there he was, and with an absolutely infantile 
gun, a mere baby gun, in the yellow light, but it 
shone like bright silver. 

Reynolds with visible embarrassment stood up. 

“ Throw your cannon into the stove, Reynolds, 
you won’t need it,” suggested Shockley. Rey- 
nolds looked around ; there appeared to be no 
hopeful alternative : the drop looked very cold ; 
not a cowboy interposed. Under convoy, Rey- 
nolds stumped over to the stove and threw in his 
gun, but the grace of the doing was bad. 

“ Get up there on the bar and dance ; hustle ! ” 
urged Shockley. They had to help the confused 





Chris; 




'■ \ 
A 

.,• - \ 



• \ W' \ . 

' J \/ ‘ 


# 


% 


5 

I 


I 


> 

I 


i 


The Switchman’s Story 21 

cowboy up ; and when he stood shamefaced, look- 
ing down on the scene of his constant triumphs, 
and did a painful single foot, marking time with 
his peg, the cowboys, who had .stood their own 
share of his bullying, roared. Shockley did n’t 
roar; only stood with busy eyes where he could 
cover any man on demand, not, forgetting even Pat 
Barlie. 

Peg Leg, who had danced so ‘many in his day, 
danced, and his roasting gun sputtered an accom- 
paniment from the stove ; but as Shockley, who 
stood in front of it, paid no attention to the 
fusillade of bullets, good form prevented others 
from dodging. ‘‘That’ll do; get down. Come 
here, Chris,” called Shockley. Chris Oxen, greatly 
disturbed, issued from an obscure corner. 

“ Get down on your knees,” exclaimed the yard 
master, jerking Reynolds with a chilly twist in 
front of the frightened Russian. “ Get on your 
knees ; right where I threw your whiskey,” and 
Shockley, crowding Reynolds down to his humilia- 
tion, dropped for the first time into range civilities 


2 2 Held for Orders 

himself, and the shame and the abasement of it 

were very great. 

“ Boys,” said the yard master, with one restless 
eye on Reynolds and one on everybody else, as he 
pointed at Chris, “ this man’s coat was burnt up. 
He ’s a poor devil, and his money comes hard. 
Chip in for a new goat. I ’ve nothing against any 
man that don’t want to give, but Reynolds must 
pass the hat. Take mine, you coyote.” 

Nearly everybody contributed as Reynolds went 
round. Shockley made no comments. “ Count 
it,” he commanded, when the fallen monarch had 
finished ; and when the tale was made, Shockley 
told Pat Barlie to put in as much more as the cap 
held, and he did so. 

“ There, Chris ; go home. I don’t like you,” 
added Shockley, insolently, turning on Reynolds. 
“ You don’t know what fun is. This town won’t 
hold you and me after to-night. You can take it 
or you can leave it, but the first time I ever put 
eyes on you again one of us will cash in.” 

He backed directly towards the front door and out. 


The Switchman’s Story 23 

Peg Leg Reynolds took only the night to decide ; 
next day he hit the trail. The nervy yard master 
he might have wiped out if he had stayed, but the 
disgrace of kneeling before the dog of a Russian 
was something never to be wiped out in the annals 
of Benkleton. Peg Leg moved on ; and thereafter 
cowboys took occasion to stop Shockley on the 
street and jolly him on the way he did the one- 
legged bully, and the lights were shot no more. 

The railroad men swore by the new yard master; 
the Russians took their cigarettes from their mouths 
and touched their caps when Shockley passed ; 
Callahan blessed his name; but little Chris wor- 
shiped him. 

One day Alfabet Smith dropped off at Benkleton 
from Omaha headquarters. Alfabet was the only 
species of’ lizard on the pay roll — he was the 
West End spotter.. “Who is that slim fellow?’’ 
he asked of Callahan as Shockley flew by on the 
pilot board of an engine. 

“ That ’s Shockley.” 

“ Oh, that ’s Shockley, is it ? ” 


Held for Orders 


24 

But he could say little things in a way to make a 
man prick hot all over. 

‘‘ Yes, that ’s Shockley. Why ? ” asked Callahan 
with a dash of acid. 

“ Nothing, only he ’s a valuable man ; he 's 
wanted, Shockley is,” smiled Alfabet Smith, but his 
smile would freeze tears. 

Callahan took it up short. “ Look here, Alfabet. 
Keep off Shockley.” ' / 

“Why?” 

“ Why ? Because you and I will touch, head 
on, if you don’t.” 

Smith said nothing ; he was used to that sort. 
The next time Bucks was up, his assistant told him 
of the incident. 

“ If he bothers Shockley,” Bucks said, “ we ’ll get 
his scalp, that’s all. He’d better look after his 
conductors and leave our men alone.” 

I notice Shockley isn’t keeping his frogs 
blocked,” continued Bucks, reverting to other mat- 
ters. “ That won’t do. I want every frog in the yard 
blocked and kept blocked, and tell him I said so.” 


The Switchman’s Story 25 

But the frog-blocking was not what worried 
Shockley ; his push was to keep the yard clean, for 
the month of December brought more stuff twice 
over than was ever poured into the front-end yard 
before. Chris, though, had developed into a great 
switchman, and the two never let the work get 
ahead. 

So it came that Little Russia honored Chris and 
his big pay check above most men. Shockley stood 
first in Little Russia ; then the CZAR, then Chris, 
then Callahan. Queen Victoria and Bismarck might 
have admirers ; but they were not in it under the 
bench. 

When the Russian holidays came, down below, 
Chris concluded that the celebration would be merely 
hollow without Shockley ; for was not the very exist- 
ence of Little Russia due to him ? All the growth, 
all the prosperity — what was it due to ? Protection. 
What was the protection ? Shockley. There were 
brakemen who argued that protection came from the 
tariff; but they never made any converts in Little 
Russia, where the inhabitants could be induced to 


26 Held for Orders 

vote for president only on the assurance that Shockley 
was running. 

“ Well, what’s the racket anyhow, Chris ? ” de- 
manded Shockley lazily, after Cross-Eyes trying to 
get rid of the invitation to the festivities had sput- 
tered switch-English five minutes at him. 

‘‘ Ve got Chrismus by us,” explained Chris des- 
perately. 

“ Christmas,” repeated Shockley grimly. “ Christ- 
mas. Why, man, Christmas don’t come nowhere 
on earth in January. You want to wind up your 
calendar. Where ’d you get them shoes ? ” 

“ Dollar sefenty-vife.” 

“ Where ? ” 

“ Rubedo.” 

“ And don’t you know a switchman ought n’t t’ 
put his feet in flatboats ? Don’t you know some day 
you ’ll get your foot stuck in a tongue or a guard ? 
Then where ’ll you be, Dutch, with a string of flats 
rolling down on you, eh ? ” 

However, Chris stuck for his request. He 
would n’t take no for an answer. Next day he 
tired Shockley out. 


The Switchman’s Story 27 

“Well, for God’s sake let up, Chris,” said the yard 
master at last. “ I ’ll come down a while after 
Twenty-three comes in. Get back early after sup- 
per, and we ’ll make up Fifty-five and let the rest 

It was a pretty night ; pretty enough over the yard 
for anybody’s Christmas, Julian or Gregorian. No 
snow, but a moon, and a full one, rising early over 
the Arikaree bluffs, and a frost that bit and sparkled, 
and the north wind asleep in the sand hills. 

Shockley, after supper, snug in a pea-jacket and a 
storm cap, rode with the switch engine down from 
the roundhouse. Chris, in his astrakhan reefer and 
turban, walking over from the dugouts in Rubedo’s 
new shoes, flipped the footboard at the stock-yard 
with almost the roll of Shockley himself. 

Happily for Christmas in Little Russia, Twenty- 
three pulled in on time ; but it was long and heavy 
that night. It brought coal and ties, and the stuff 
for the Fort Rawlins depot, and a batch of bridge 
steel they had been waiting two weeks for — mostly 
Cherry Creek stuff — eleven cars of it. 


28 


Held for Orders 


The minute the tired engine was cut ofF the long 
train, up ran the little switch engine and snapped 
at the headless monster like a coyote. 

Out came the coal with a clatter ; out came the 
depot stuff with a sheet of flame through the goat’s 
flues — shot here, shot there, shot yonder — flying 
down this spur and down that and the other, like 
stones from a catapult ; and the tough-connected, 
smut-faced, blear-eyed yard engine coughed and 
snorted and spit a shower of sparks and soot and cin- 
ders up into the Christmas air. She darted and dodged 
and jerked, and backed up and down and across the 
lead, and never for a fraction of a second took her 
eye off Shockley’s lamp. Shivering and clanging 
and bucking with steam and bell and air, but always 
with one smoky eye on Shockley’s lamp, until 
Twenty-three was wrecked clean to the caboose, 
and the switch engine shot down the main line 
with the battered way -car in her claws like a hawk 
with a prairie dog. 

Then there was only the west-bound freight. 
Fifty-five, to make up with the Fort Rawlins stuff 


The Switchman’s Story 29 

and the Cherry Creek steel, which was “ r«j/5?,”and a 
few cars of ties flung on behind on general principles. 
It was quick work now — sorting and moving the 
bridge steel — half an hour for an hour’s work, with 
the north wind waking at the clatter and sweeping 
a bank of cloud and sand across the valley. Shock- 
ley and Chris and the goat crew put at it like black 
ants. There was releasing and setting and kicking 
and splitting, and once in a while a flying switch, 
dead against the rubrics; and at last the whole 
train of steel was in line, clean as the links of a 
sprocket, and ready to run in on the house-track for 
the caboose. 

For that run Chris set the east house-track switch, 
crossed the track, and swung a great circle with his 
lamp for the back. To get over to the switch 
again, he started to recross the track. In the dark 
his ankle turned on a lump of coal ; he recovered 
lightly, but the misstep sent his other foot wide, 
and with a bit of a jolt Rubedo’s new shoe slipped 
into the frog. 

Up the track he heard a roll of stormy coughs from 


Held for Orders 


30 

the engine gathering push to shove the string of 
flats down. They were coming towards him, over 
the spot where he stood, on his signal ; and he 
quietly tried to loosen his heel. 

The engine’s drivers let go, and she roared a 
steaming oath, and Chris could hear it ; but he 
was glad, for his heel would not work quietly out 
of the frog 5 it stuck. Then the engineer, un- 
ruffled, pulled at his sand lever, and his engine 
snorted again and her driver tires bit, and slowly 
she sent the long train of steel down on Chris’s 
switch; he heard the frosty flanges grinding on 
the face of the rails as he tried to loosen his 
foot. 

Coolly, first, like a confident man in a quicksand ; 
soon, with alarm running into fright. But there 
was time enough ; the head car was four or five 
lengths above the switch and coming very, very 
slowly, heavy-like, and squeaking stiffly under its 
load, yet coming ; and he wrenched harder, but his 
foot stuck. Then he yelled for Shockley. Shock- 
ley had gone over to open the caboose switch ; 


The Switchman's Story 31 

Shockley could n’t hear, and he knew it. And he 
yelled again. 

The sweat broke over him as he turned and twisted. 
The grip of the frog seemed to stifle him j half the* 
time was gone ; the near truck wheels screeched two 
car-lengths away : and the switchman played his last 
card. Time and time again Shockley had told him 
what to do if that moment came in the night ; had 
told him to throw his lamp in the air like a rocket. 
But Chris had forgotten all that till the flat dropped 
heavily on the tongue in front of him ; then he threw 
his lamp like a rocket high into the night. 

No help came. He raised his arms frantically 
above his head, and his cries cut the wind. Des- 
perate at last, he threw himself flat to lie outside 
the rail, to save all but a foot ; but the frog held 
him, and crying horribly he struggled back to his 
feet, only to sink again half crazy to the ground. 
As his senses left him he was hardly aware of a 
stinging pain in his foot, of a wrench at his leg, an 
instant arm round his back, and his yard master’s 
voice in his ear. 


Held for Orders 


32 

“ Jump ! ” screamed Shockley. 

Chris, scrambling frantically on the deadly rails, 
unable to jump, felt himself picked from the ground, 
heard a choke in the throat at his ear, and he was 
flung like a drawbar through the dark. Shockley 
had passed a knife blade from vamp to sole, slit 
the Russian’s clumsy shoe, jerked his foot from it, 
and thrown him bodily into the clear. 

Chris staggered panting to his feet. Already the 
steel was moving slowly over the switch ; he heard 
the sullen pounding of the trucks on the contact ; 
a lantern, burning yet, lay on its side near the 
stand — it was Shockley’s lamp. Chris looked 
wildly around for his yard master j called out ; 
called Shockley’s name ; listened. No scream, no 
groan, no cry, no answer; no sound, but just the 
steady pounding of the wheels over the contact. 
The little switchman screamed again in a frenzj^, 
and turning, raced stumbling up the track to the 
cab. He swung into it, and by signs made the 
engineer shut olF. He tried to talk, and only 
stammered a lingo of switch-pidgin and the name 


The Switchman’s Story 33 

of Shockley. They could n’t understand it all, but 
they shut off with faces pinched and sallow, threw 
open the furnace door, and grabbing their lanterns 
ran back. The fireman on his knees held his 
lamp out under the flat that spanned the contact ; 
he drew shrinking back, and rising, started on the 
run for the depot to rouse Callahan. 

It was Callahan who pulled the pin a moment later, 
Chris shivering like a rabbit at his side. It was 
Callahan who gave the slow pull-ahead order that 
cut the train in two at the frog, and Callahan who 
stepped wavering from the gap that opened behind 
the receding flat — back from something between 
the rails — back to put his hands blindly out 
for the target-rod, and unsteadily upon it. He 
heard Shockley breathing. 

Some carried the headlight back, and some tore the 
door off a box car, and they got him on. They 
carried him unevenly, stumbling, over to the depot. 
They laid him on Callahan’s mattress in the wait- 
ing room, and the men stood all about him ; but 
the only sound was his breathing, and inside under 


3 


Held for Orders 


34 

the lamp the receiver, clicking, clicking, clicking, 
of Bucks and the company surgeon coming on a 
special ahead of Fifty-nine. 

They twisted tourniquets into his quivering flesh, 
and with the light dying in his eyes they put whiskey 
to his lips. But he turned his head and spit it from 
his mouth. Then he looked from face to face about 
him — to the engineer and to the fireman, and to 
little Chris and to Callahan, and his lips moved. 

Chris bent over him, but try as he would he could 
not catch the words. And Callahan listened and 
watched and waited. 

‘‘ Block — block — ” said Shockley’s lips. And 
Callahan wiped them slowly and bent close again 
and put his ear over them. “ Block — block — the 
— frogs.” 

And Shockley died. 

They lifted the mattress into the baggage room ; 
Callahan drew over it a crumpled sheet. A lantern 
left, burned on the checking desk, but the men, ex- 
cept Chris, went their ways. Chris hung irresolute 
around the open door. 


The Switchman’s Story 35 

The special pulled in, and with the shoes wringing 
fire from her heels as she slowed, Bucks and a 
man following close sprang from the step of the 
coach. Callahan met them ; shook his head. 

Twenty minutes later Fifty-nine whistled for the 
yard ; but in the yard all was dark and still. One 
man got off Fifty-nine that night. Carrying his 
little valise in his hand, he walked in and out of the 
depot, hanging on the edges of the grouping men, 
who still talked of the accident. After hearing, he 
walked alone into the baggage room, and with his 
valise in his hand drew back the edge of the sheet 
and, standing, looked. Afterward he paused at the 
door, and spoke to a man that was fixing a lantern. 
“ What was his name 
“ Shockley.*’ 

“ Shockley ? ” 

“Yes.*^ 

Yard master here ? ” 

‘‘ Yes. Know him ? ” 

“Me? No. Iguessnot.” He walked away with 
his valise, and drew his coat collar up in the wind 


36 Held for Orders 

that swept the platform. “I guess I don’t want 
him,” he muttered to himself. “ I guess they don’t 
want him ; not now.” And he went back to the 
man and asked when a train left again for Chicago. 
He had a warrant for Shockley; but Shockley’s 
warrant had been served. 

After the others had gone, Bucks and Callahan and 
the surgeon talked together in the waiting room, 
and Chris hanging by, blear-eyed and helpless, looked 
from one to the other : showed his foot when Cal- 
lahan pointed, and sat patient while the surgeon 
stitched the slit where Shockley’s blade had touched 
the bone. Then he stood again and listened. While 
any one talked Chris would listen ; silent and help- 
less, just listening. And when Bucks had gone 
up stairs, and the surgeon had gone up stairs, and 
Callahan, tired and sick, had gone up stairs, and only 
the operator sat under his lamp at the table, Chris 
stood back in the gloom in front of the stove and 
poked stealthily at the fire. When it blazed he 
dropped big chunks of smutty coal in on it, and 
wiped his frost-bitten nose with the back of his 


37 


The Switchman’s Story 

dirty hand, and looked toward the baggage room 
door and listened — listened for a cry, or a sound, 
or for that fearful, fearful breathing, such breathing 
as he had not been hearing before. But no cry, no 
sound, no stertorous breath came out of the dark- 
ness, and from under the lamp in front of the 
operator only the sounder clicked, always talking, 
talking, talking — talking queer things to Russian 
ears. 

So Chris drew his cap a little lower, for so he always 
began, pulled mechanically from his pocket a time- 
table, tore olF a strip, and holding it carefully open, 
sprinkled a few clippings of tobacco upon it, and 
rolled his cigarette. He tucked it between his lips; 
it was company for the silence, and he could more 
easily stop the listening. But he did not light ; 
only pulled his cap again a little lower, buttoned 
close his reefer, looked at his bandaged foot, picked 
up his lamp, and started home. 

It was dark, and the wind from the north was bitter, 
but he made a great detour into the teeth of it — 
around by the coal chutes, a long way round, a long 


38 Held for Orders 

way from the frog of the east house-track switch; and 
the cold stung his face as he limped heavily on. At 
last by' the ice house he turned south, and reaching 
the face of the bench paused a moment, hesitating, 
on the side of the earthen stairs ; it was very dark. 
After a bit he walked slowly down and pushed open 
the door of his dugout. It was dark inside, and 
cold ; the lire was out. The children were asleep ; 
the woman was asleep. 

He sat down in a chair and put out his lamp. 
There was no Christmas that night in Little Russia. 









Held for Orders 


The Wiper’s Story 

At 

HOW McGRATH GOT 
AN ENGINE 





The Wiper’s Story 

At 

HOW McGRATH GOT 
AN ENGINE 

T his came about through there being whis- 
kers on the rails. It may not be gen- 
erally understood that whiskers grow on 
steel rails ; curious as it seems, they do. More- 
over, on steel rails they are dangerous, and, at times, 
exceedingly dangerous. 

Do not infer that all steel rails grow whiskers; nor 
is it, as one might suppose, only the old rails that sport 
them. The youngest rail on the curve may boast as 
stout a beard as the oldest rail on the tangent, and one 
just as gray. They flourish, too, in spite of orders ; 
for while whiskers are permitted on engineers and 
tolerated on conductors, they are never encouraged 
on rails. Nature, however, provides the whiskers. 


Held for Orders 


42 

regardless of discipline, and, what is more, shaves 
them herself. 

Their culture depends on conditions. Some 
months grow better whiskers than others : September 
is famous for whiskers, while July grows very few. 
Whiskers will grow on steel rails in the air of a single 
night ; but not every night air will produce whiskers. 
It takes a high, frosty air, one that stays out late, to 
make whiskers. Take, for example, the night air of 
the Black Hills ; it is known everywhere among steel 
rails as a beard tonic. The day’s moisture, falling as 
the sun drops beyond the hills is drawn into feathery, 
jewelled crystals of frost on the chilly steel, as a glass 
of ice-water beads in summer shade ; and these dewy 
stalagmites rise in a dainty profusion, until when day 
peeps into the canons the track looks like a pair of 
long white streamers winding up and down the levels. 
But beware that track. It is a very dangerous track, 
and its possibilities lie where Samson’s lay — in the 
whiskers. 

So it lies in early morning, as pretty a death-trap as 
any flower that ever lured a fly; only, this pitfall 


The Wiper’s Story 43 

waits for engines and trains- and men — and some- 
times gets them. 

It waits there on the mountain grades, in an 
ambush really deadly for an unwary train, until the 
sun, which is particularly lazy in the fall, peeping 
over into the cuts, smiles, at length, on the bearded 
stepl as if it were too funny, and the whiskers 
vanish into thin air. 

A smooth-faced rail presents no especial dangers ; 
and if trainmen in the Hills had their way, they would 
never turn a wheel until the sun had done barbering. 
But despatchers not having to do with them take no 
account of whiskers. They make only the schedules, 
and the whiskers make the trouble. To lessen their 
dangers, engineers always start, up hill or down, with 
a tankful of sand, and they sand the whiskers. It is 
rough barbering, but it helps the driver-tires grit a bit 
into the face of the rail, and in that way hang on. In 
this emergency a tankful of sand is better than all the 
air Westinghouse ever stored. 

Aloysius McGrath was a little sweeper ; but he 
was an aspiring one, for even a sweeper may aspire. 


Held for Orders 


44 

and in point of fact most of them do aspire. Aloyslus 
worked in the roundhouse at the head of the Wind 
River pass on the West End Mountains. It is an 
amazingly rough country ; and as for grades, it takes 
your breath merely to look down the levels. Three 
per cent, four per cent, five per cent — it is really 
frightful ! But Aloysius was used to heavy falls ; he 
had begun working fbr the company as a sweeper 
under Johnnie Horigan, and no engineer would have 
thought of running a grade to compare with John- 
nie’s headers. 

* Horigan was the first boss Aloysius ever had. 
Now Aloysius, if caught just right, is a very pretty 
name,but Johnnie Horigan could make nothing what- 
ever of it, so he called Aloysius, Cooney, as he said, 
for short — Cooney McGrath — and, by the way, if 
you will call that McGraw, we shall be started right. 
As for Horigan, he may be called anything ; at least 
it is certain that on the West End he has been called 
everything. 

Johnnie was ordinarily boss sweeper. He had 
suffered numerous promotions — several times to 


The Wiper’s Story 45 

wiper, and once to hostler ; but his tendency to 
celebrate these occasions usually cost him his job, 
and he reverted to sweeping. If he had not been 
such an inoffensive, sawed-off little old nubbin he 
would n’t have been tolerated on the pay rolls ; but 
he had been with the company so long and discharged 
so often that foremen grew tired of trying to get rid 
of him, and in spite of his very regular habits, he 
was hanging on somewhere all the time. 

When Johnnie was gone, using the word in at 
least two senses, Aloysius Cooney McGrath became, 
ipso facto^ boss sweeper. It happened first one Sun- 
day morning, just after pay day, when Johnnie ap- 
plied to the foreman for permission to go to church. 
Permission was granted, and Johnnie started for 
church \ but it is doubtful whether he ever found it. 
At all events, at the end of three weeks he turned up 
again at the roundhouse, considerably the worse for 
his attempt to locate the house of prayer — which he 
had tried to find only after he had been kicked out of 
every other place in town. 

Aloysius had improved the interval by sweeping 


46 Held for Orders 

the roundhouse as it never had been swept before; and 
when Johnnie Horigan returned, morally disfigured, 
Aloysius McGrath was already promoted to be wiper 
over his old superior. Johnnie was in no wise en- 
vious. His only move was to turn the misfortune to 
account for an ulterior purpose, and he congratulated 
the boy, affecting that he had stayed away to let them 
see what stuff the young fellow was made of. This 
put him in a position to negotiate a small loan from 
his protege — a position of which he never neglected 
the possibilities. It was out of the question to be mad 
very long at Johnnie, though one might be very often. 
After a time Aloysius got to firing : then he wanted 
an engine. But he fired many months, and there 
came no promotion. The trouble was, there were 
no new crews added to the engine service. Nobody 
got killed ; nobody quit ; nobody died. One, two, 
and three years without a break, and little Aloysius 
had become a bigger Aloysius, and was still firing ; 
he became also discouraged, for then the force was 
cut down and he was put back wiping. 

“ Never y' mind, never y’ mind, Cooney,” old 


The Wiper's Story 


47 


Johnnie would say. “It’ll come all right. You’ll 
get y’r ingin’ yet. Lind me a couple till pay-a-day, 
Cooney, will you ? I ’ll wahrant y’ y’r ingin’ yet, 
Cooney.” Which little assurance always cost 
Aloysius two dollars till pay day, and no end of 
trouble getting it back ; for when he attempted collec- 
tion, Johnnie took a very dark view of the lad’s 
future, alluding vaguely to people who were hard- 
hearted and ungrateful to their best friends. And 
though Aloysius paid slight attention to the did 
sweeper’s vaporings, he really was in the end the 
means of the boy’s getting his engine. 

After three years of panic and hard times on the 
mountain division, the mines began to reopen, new 
spurs were laid out, construction crews were put on, 
and a new activity was everywhere apparent. But to 
fill the cup of Aloysius’ woe, the new crews were all 
sent up from McCloud. That they were older men 
in the order of promotion was cold comfort — Aloy- 
sius felt crowded out. He went very blue, and the 
next time Johnnie applied fora loan Aloysius rebuffed 
him unfeelingly ; this in turn depressed John. 


48 Held for Orders 

“ Never mind, never mind, Cooney. I Ml not be 
speakin’ t’ Neighbor agin t’ set y’ up. If y’ like 
wipin’, stick to ut. I ’ll not be troublin’ Neighbor 
agin.” Johnnie professed a great pull with the master 
mechanic. 

That Aloysius might feel still more the sting of his 
coldness, Johnnie for some days paid much court to 
the new firemen and engine runners. Nothing about 
the house was too good for them, and as the crafty 
sweeper never overlooked an opportunity, he was in 
debt before the end of the week to most of the 
brotherhood. 

But the memorable morning for Aloysius came 
shortly thereafter. It was one of those keen October 
mornings that bite so in the Hills. The construction 
train. Extra 240 West, had started about five o’clock 
from the head of the pass with a load of steel for the 
track layers, and stopped for a bite of breakfast at 
Wind River. Above the roundhouse there is a 
switchback. When the train pulled in, the crew got 
off for some hot coffee. Johnnie Horigan was around 
playing good fellow, and he climbed into the cab to 


The Wiper’s Story 49 

run the train through the switchback while the crews 
were at the eating house. It was irregular to leave 
the engine, but they did, and as for Johnnie Horigan, 
he was regularly irregular. There were sixteen cars 
of steel in the string, besides a cabooseful of laborers. 
The backing up the leg of the nipper was easy. After 
the switch was newly set, Johnnie pulled down the 
lower leg ; and that, considering the whiskers, was 
too easy. 

When he pulled past the eating house on the down 
grade, he was going so lively with his flats that he 
was away before the crew could get out of the lunch 
room. In just one minute everybody in Wind 
River was in trouble : the crew, because their 
train was disappearing down the canon ; the eating 
house man, because nobody paid him for his coffee ; 
and Johnnie Horigan, because he found it impossi- 
ble to stop. He had dumped the sand, he had 
applied the air, he had reversed the engine — by all 
the rules laid down in the instruction car she ought 
to stop. But she did n’t stop, and — this was the 
embarrassing feature — she was headed down a hill 



4 


Held for Orders 


5 ° 

twenty miles long, with curves to weary a boa- 
constrictor. John hung his head wildly over the 
drivers, looked back at the yelling crew, contem- 
plated the load that was pushing him down the 
grade and his head began to swim. There ap- 
peared but one thing more to do : that was to make a 
noise ; and as he neared the roundhouse he whistled 
like the wind. Aloysius O’Cooney McGrath, at 
the alarm, darted out of the house like a fox. As 
he reached the door he saw the construction train 
coming, and Johnnie Horigan in the gangway look- 
ing for a soft place to light. 

The wiper chartered the situation in a mental 
second. The train was running away, and Hori- 
gan was leaving it to its fate. From any point of 
view it was a tough proposition, but tough proposi- 
tions come rarely to ambitious railroad men, and 
Aloysius was starving for any sort of a proposition 
that would help him out of the waste. The laborers 
in the caboose, already bewildered, were craning 
anxiously from the windows. Horigan, opposite 
the roundhouse, jumped in a sprawl; the engine 


The Wiper’s Story 51 

was shot past Aloysius j boarding was out of the 
question. 

But on the siding stood a couple of flats, empty ; 
and with his hair straight on centres, the little 
wiper ran for them and mounted the nearest. The 
steel train was jumping. Aloysius, bunching his 
muscle, ran the length of the two flats for a head, 
and, from the far corner, threw himself across the 
gap, like a bat, on a load of the runaway steel. 
Scrambling to his feet, he motioned and yelled to 
the hoboes, who were pouring frantic out on the 
hind flat of the string, to set brakes ; then he made 
ahead for the engine. 

It was a race with the odds all wrong, for with 
every yard Aloysius gained, the train gained a 
dozen. By the time he reached the tender, breath- 
less, and slid down the coal into the deserted cab, 
the train was heading into Little Horn gap, and ev- 
ery Italian aboard, yelling for life. Aloysius jumped 
into the levers, poked his head through the window, 
and looked at the drivers. They were in the back 
motion, and in front of them the sand was stream- 


Held for Orders 


52 

ing wide open. The first thing he did was to 
shut half it off — the fight could not be won by- 
wasting ammunition. Over and over again he 
jerked at the air. It was refusing its work. Where 
so many a hunted runner has turned for salvation 
there was none for Aloysius. He opened and 
closed, threw on and threw off; it was all one, 
and all useless. The situation was as simple as it 
was frightful. Even if they did n’t leave the track, 
they were certain to smash into Number Sixteen, 
the up-passenger, which must meet them some- 
where on the hill. 

Aloysius’s fingers closed slowly on the sand lever. 
There was nothing on earth for it but sand, merely 
sand; and even the wiper’s was oozing with the 
stream that poured from the tank on the whiskered 
rails. He shut off a bit more, thinking of the ter- 
rific curves below, and mentally calculated — or tried 
to — how long his steam would last to reverse the 
drivers — how he could shovel coal and sand the 
curves at the same time — and how much slewing 
the Italians at the tail of the kite could stand with- 
out landing on the rocks. 


The Wiper’s Story 53 

The pace was giddy and worse. When his brain 
was whirling fastest, a man put a hand on his 
shoulder. Aloysius started as if Davy Jones had 
tapped him, and between bounces looked, scared, 
around. He looked into a face he didn’t know 
from Adam’s, but there was sand in the eyes that 
met his. 

“ What can I do ? ” 

Aloysius saw the man’s lips move, and, without 
taking his hands from the levers, bent his head to 
catch the words. 

“ What can I do ? ” shouted the man at his elbow. 

“ Give me steam — steam,” cried the wiper, look- 
ing straight ahead. 

It was the foreman of the steel gang from the 
caboose. Aloysius, through the backs of his eyes, 
saw him grab the shovel and make a pass at the 
tender. Doing so, he nearly took a header through 
the gangway, but he hung to the shovel and braced 
himself better. 

With the next attempt he got a shovelful into the 
cab, but in the delivery passed it well up Aloysius’s 


Held for Orders 


54 

neck. There were neither words nor grins, but 
just another shovelful of coal a minute after ; and 
the track-layer, in spite of the dizzy lurching, shot 
it where it belonged — into the furnace. Feeling 
that if one shovelful could be landed, more could, 
AlyosiuS’s own steam rose. As they headed madly 
around the Cinnamon bend the dial began to climb 
in spite of the obstacles; and the wiper, consider- 
ing there were two, and the steam and the sand to 
fight the thing out, opened his valve and dusted the 
whiskers on the curve with something more than a 
gleam of hope. 

If there was confusion on the runaway train, there 
was terror and more below it. As the spectre flitted 
past Pringle station, five miles down the valley, the 
agent caught a glimpse of the sallow face of the 
wiper at the cab window, and saw the drivers whirl- 
ing backward. He rushed to his key and called the 
Medicine Bend despatches With a tattoo like a 
drum-roll the despatcher in turn called Soda Springs, 
ten miles below Pringle, where Number Sixteen, the 
up-passenger, was then due. He rattled on with 


The Wiper’s Story 55 

his heart in his fingers, and answer came on the 
instant. Then an order flashed into Soda Springs: 

To No. 16. 

Take Soda Springs siding quick. Extra 240 
West has lost control of the train. Di. 

There never was such a bubbling at Soda Springs 
as that bubbling. The operator tore up the platform 
like a hawk in a chicken yard. Men never scat- 
tered so quick as when Number Sixteen began 
screaming and wheezing and backing for the clear. 
Above the town, Aloysius, eyes white to the sockets, 
shooting the curves like a meteor, watched his less- 
ening stream of sand pour into the frost on the track. 
As they whipped over bridges and fills the caboose 
reeled like a dying top — fear froze every soul on 
board. To leave the track now meant a scatter 
that would break West End records. 

When Soda Springs sighted Extra 240 West, pitch- 
ing down the mountain, the steel dancing behind and 
Aloysius jumping before, there was a painful sensa- 
tion — the sensation of good men who see a disaster 


56 Held for Orders 

they are powerless to avert. Nor did Soda Springs 
know how desperate the wiper’s extremity had be- 
come. Not even the struggling steel foreman knew 
that with Soda Springs passing like the films of a 
cinematograph, and two more miles of down-grade 
ahead, the last cupful of sand was trickling from the 
wiper’s tank. Aloysius, at that moment, would n’t 
have given the odd change on a pay check for all the 
chances Extra 240 and he himself had left. He stuck 
to his levers merely because there was no particular 
reason for letting go. It was only a question of how 
a man wanted to take the rocks. Yet, with all his 
figuring, Aloysius had lost sight of his only salvation 
— maybe because it was quite out of his power to 
effect it himself. But in making the run up to Soda 
Springs Number Sixteen had already sanded the rails 
below. 

He could feel the help the minute the tires ground 
into the grit. They began to smoke, and Aloysius 
perceived the grade was easing somewhat. Even 
the dazed foreman, looking back, saw an improve- 
ment in the lurch of the caboose. There was one 


The Wiper’s Story 57 

more hair-raiser ahead — the appalling curve at the 
forks of the Goose. But, instead of being hurled 
over the elevation, they found themselves around it 
and on the bridge with only a vicious slew. Aloy- 
sius’s hair began to lie down, and his heart to 
rise up. He had her checked — even the hoboes 
knew it — and a mile further, with the dangers 
past, they took new ones by dropping off the hind 
end. 

At the second bend below the Goose, Alovsius 
made a stop, and began again to breathe. A box was 
blazing on the tender truck, and, with his handy 
fireman, he got down at once to doctor it. The 
whole thing shifted so mortally quick from danger 
to safety that the two never stopped to inventory 
their fears ; they seemed to have vanished with the 
frost that lured them to destruction. They jumped 
together into the cab ; and whistling at the labor- 
ers strung back along the right of way Extra 240 
West began backing pluckily up hill to Soda Springs. 
The first man who approached the cab as they slQwed 
down for the platform — in fact, people rather stood 


58 Held for Orders 

back for him — was Bucks, Superintendent of the 
Division ; his car had come in attached to Number 
Sixteen. 

‘‘ How did your train get away from you ? ” he 
asked of Aloysius; there was neither speculation 
nor sympathy in his manner and his words were 
bitten with frost. 

“ It did n’t get away from me,” retorted Aloysius, 
who had never before in his life seen the man, and 
was not aware that he owed him any money. But 
the operator at the Springs, who knew Aloysius and 
the superintendent both, was standing behind the lat- 
ter doing a pantomime that would shame a medicine 
man. 

“ Quick talking will do more for you than smart 
talking,” replied the superintendent, crisply. ‘‘You ’ll 
never get a better chance while you ’re working for 
this company to explain yourself.” 

Aloysius himself began to think so, for the nods 
and winks of the operatorwere bewildering. He tried 
to speak up, but the foreman of the steel gang put in : 
“See here, sport,” he snapped, irreverently, at the 


The Wiper’s Story 59 

angry official. “ Why don’t you cool your hat 
before you jump a fellow like that ? ” 

“ What business is it of yours how I jump a fel- 
low?” returned the superintendent, sharply, “who 
are you ? ” 

“ I ’m only foreman of this steel gang, my friend ; 
and I don’t take any back talk from anybody.” 

“ In that case,” responded Bucks, with velvet sar- 
casm, “ perhaps will explain things. I ’m only 
superintendent of this division ; but it’s customary 
to inquire into matters of this kind.” 

Aloysius at the words nearly sank to the platform ; 
but the master of the hoboes, who had all the facts, 
went at the big man as if he had been one of the 
gang, and did not falter till he had covered the 
perspiring wiper with glory. 

“ What ’s the reason the air would n’t work ? ” 
asked the superintendent, turning, without com- 
ment, when the track-layer had finished, to Aloysius. 

“ I have n’t had time to find out, sir.” 

“ Find out and report to me. What ’s your 
name? ” 


6o 


Held for Orders 


“ McGrath.” 

“ McGraw, eh ? Well, McGraw, look close into 
the air. There may be something in it for you. 
You did the firing? ” he added, turning short again 
on the unabashed steel foreman. 

“ What there was done.” 

“ I ’ll do a little now myself. I ’ll fire you right 
here and now for impertinence.” 

“ I suppose you ’re the boss,” responded the man 
of ties, imperturbably. “ When I made the crack, 
I ’d made it harder if I had known who you were.” 

“ You know now, don’t you ? ” 

“ I guess so.” 

“ Very good,” said Bucks, in his mildest tones. 
“ If you will report to me at Medicine Bend this 
afternoon, I ’ll see whether we can’t find some- 
thing better for your manners than cursing hoboes. 
You can ride down in my car, sport. What do 
you say ? That will save you transportation.” 

It brought a yell from the railroad men crowding 
around, for that was Bucks’s way of doing things ; 
and the men liked Bucks and his way. The ex- 


The Wiper’s Story 6i 

captain of the dagoes tried to look cool, but in 
point of fact went very sheepish at his honors. 

Followed by a mob, eager to see the finish. Super- 
intendent Bucks made his way up the track along 
the construction train to where Aloysius and the 
engineer of Number Sixteen were examining the 
air. They found it frozen between the first and 
the second car. Bucks heard it all — heard the 
whole story. Then he turned to his clerk. 

“ Discharge both crews of Extra 240. Fire 
Johnnie Horigan.” 

“ Yes, sir.” 

“ McGrath, run your train back to Wind River 
behind us. We’ll scare up a conductor here some- 
where ; if we can’t, I ’ll be your conductor. Make 
your report to Medicine Bend,” Bucks added, 
speaking to the operator ; and without further 
words walked back to his car. 

As he turned away, the engineer of Number Six- 
teen slapped Aloysius on the back : 

“ Kid, why the blazes did n’t you thank him ? ” 

« Who ? ” 


62 


Held for Orders 


“ Bucks.” 

“ What for?” 

“ What for ? Jiminey Christmas I What for ? 
Didn’t he just make you an engineer ? Didn’t 
he just say, ‘ Run your train back behind us to 
Wind River’?” 

« My train ? ” 

“ Sure, your train. Do you think Bucks ever says 
a thing like that without meaning it ? You bet not.” 

Bucks’s clerk, too, was a little uncertain about 
the promotion. “ I suppose he ’s competent to run 
the train back, is n’t he ? ” he asked of Bucks, 
suggestively. 

Bucks was scrawling a message. 

“ A man that could hold a train from Wind River 
here on whiskers, with nothing but a tankful of 
sand and a hobo fireman, would n’t be likely to fall 
off the right of way running back,” he returned 
dryly. “ He ’s been firing for years, has n’t he ? 
We have n’t got half enough men like McGraw. 
Tell Neighbor to give him an engine.” 




4 4 



« 











•• 




4 



» 


i 


9 


4 


9 

I 

t 


t 


*1 


ft 







f 


ft 

i 



» 


» 


f 


f 




• i 


I 



) • 


*1 

• • 

5 


I < 





? « 

*« • • 







Jt 

f 

» 

« 


V • 


<• 


• » 

» 4 * ' 



^ A 



« 



I 



I 




f 



f 


4 





%% 


» » 


»v ^ C . • 


4 


I 


« 


I 

« 


t 


I . 


♦ 



ft A 


4 


M i 


y 









Held for Orders 


The Roadmaster’s Story 

THE SPIDER WATER 


4 


V ■ ' 


.r '’iv--"/''-‘ : "■ 


< < 


<>■ 


i 




« 


f 

V 


I 



% 


r 


\ 


I 


t 






The Roadmaster’s Story 

THE SPIDER WATER 

N ot officially ; I don’t pretend to say 
that. You might travel the West End 
from fresh water to salt — and we dip 
into both — without ever locating the Spider Water 
by map or by name. 

But if you should happen anywhere on the West 
End to sit among a gang of bridge carpenters ; or 
get to confidence with a bridge foreman ; or find 
the springy side of a roadmaster’s heart ; then^ you 
might hear all you wanted about the Spider Water 
— maybe more ; anyway, full plenty, as Hailey 
used to say. 

The Sioux named it; and whatever may be thought 
of their interpretation of Scriptural views on land- 
grabbing, no man with sense ever attempted to im- 
5 


66 


Held for Orders 


prove on their names for things, whether birds, or 
braves, or winds, or waters — they know. 

Our General Managers had n’t always sense — 
this may seem odd, but on the system it would excite 
no comment — and one of them countenanced a 
shameful change in the name of the Spider Water. 
Some polytechnical idiot at a safe distance dubbed 
it The Big Sandy 5 and the Big Sandy it is to this 
day on map and in folder — but not in the lingo 
of trackmen nor the heart of the Sioux. Don’t 
say Big Sandy to trackmen and hand out a cigar. 
It will not go. Say Spider Water without any 
cigar and you will get a word and a stool, and if 
you ask it, fine cut. 

The Spider Water — although ours is the pioneer 
line — was there when we first bridged it. It is 
probably as old as sundown, and nothing like as 
pretty. The banks — it has none to speak of. 
Its stones — they are whiskered. Its bed — full 
of sand-burs. Everything about the villain stream 
has a dilapidate, broken-down air : the very mud 
of the Spider Water is rusty. 


The Roadmaster’s Story 67 

So our people bridged it ; and the trouble began. 
A number of matters bothered our pioneer man- 
agements — Indians, outlaws, cabinet officers, con- 
gressional committees, and Wall Street magnates 
— but at one time or another our folks managed 
all of them. The only thing they could n’t at any 
time satisfactorily manage was the Spider Water. 
Bridge after bridge they threw across it — and into 
it. Year after year the Spider Water toyed with 
our civil engineers and our material department. 
One man at Omaha given to asthma and statistics 
estimated, between spells, that the Spider Water 
had cost us more money than all the water courses 
together from the Missouri to the Sierras. 

Then came to the West End a masterful man, a 
Scotchman, pawky and hard. Brodie was his 
name, an Edinburgh man with no end of degrees 
and master of every one. Brodie came to be su- 
perintendent of bridges on the Western Division, 
and to boss every water course on the plains and 
in the mountains. But the Spider Water took a 
fall even out of Brodie. It swept out a Howe 


68 


Held for Orders 


truss bridge for Brodie before he got his bag un- 
packed, and thereafter Brodie, who was reputed not 
to care a stringer for anybody, did not conceal a 
distinct respect for the Spider. 

Brodie went at it right. He tried, not to make 
friends with the Spider, for nobody could do that, 
but to get acquainted with it. For this he went 
to its oldest neighbors, the Sioux. Brodie spent 
weeks and weeks up the Spider Water hunting, 
summers ; and with the Sioux he talked Spider 
Water and drank fire-water. That was Brodie’s 
shame — the fire-water. 

But he was pawky, and he chinned unceasingly 
the braves and the medicine men about the uncom- 
monly queer water that took the bridges so fast. 
The river that month in and month out could n’t 
squeeze up water enough to baptize a pollywog 
and then, of a sudden, and for a few days, would 
rage like the Missouri, restore to the desert its own 
and living image, and leave our bewildered rails 
hung up either side in the wind. 

Brodie talked cloudbursts up country ; for the 


The Roadmaster’s Story 69 

floods came, times, under clear skies — and the 
Sioux sulked in silence. He suggested an unsus- 
pected inlet from some mountain stream which 
maybe, times, sent its storm water over a low 
divide into the Spider — and the red men shrugged 
their faces. As a last resort and in desperation he 
hinted at the devil ; and the sceptics took a quick 
brace with as much as to say, now you are talking ; 
and muttered very bad Medicine. 

Then they gave him the Indian stuff about the 
Spider Water; took him away up where once a 
party of Pawnees had camped in the dust of the 
river bed to surprise the Sioux ; and told Brodie 
how the Spider, more sudden than buck, fleeter 
than pony, had come down in the night and sur- 
prised the Pawnees — and so well that the next 
morning there was n’t enough material left for a 
scalp dance. 

They took Brodie out into the ratty bed himself 
and when he said, heap dry, and said, no water, 
they laughed, Indianwise, and pointed to the sand. 
Scooping little wells with their hands they showed 


Held for Orders 


70 

him the rising and the filling; the instant water 
where before was no water. And dropping into 
the wells feathers of the grouse, they showed Bro- 
die how the current carried them always across the 
well — every time, and always, Brodie noticed — 
southeast. Then Brodie made Hailey dig many 
holes, and the Spider welled into them, and he 
threw in bits of notebooks and tobacco wrappers, 
but always they travelled southeast — always the 
same ; and a bigger fool than Brodie could see 
that the water was all there, only underground. 
But when did it rise? asked Brodie. When the 
Chinook spoke, said the Sioux. And why ? per- 
sisted Brodie. Because the Spider woke, said the 
Sioux. And Brodie went out of the camp of the 
Sioux wondering. 

And he planned a new bridge which should stand 
the Chinook and the Spider and the de’il himself, 
said Brodie, Medicine or no Medicine. And full 
seven year it lasted ; then the fire-water spoke for 
the wicked Scotchman — and he himself went out 
into the night. 


The Roadmaster’s Story 71 

And after he died, miserable wreck of a man — 
and of a very great man — the Spider woke and 
took his pawky bridge and tied up the main line 
for two weeks and set us crazy — for we were 
already losing our grip on the California fast freight 
business. But at that time Hailey was superin- 
tendent of bridges on the West End. 

I 

H IS father was a section foreman. When 
Hailey was a kid — a mere kid — he 
got into Brodie’s office doing errands ; 
but whenever he saw a draughtsman at work he was 
no good for errands. At such times he went all 
into a mental tangle that could neither be thrashed 
nor kicked out of him, though both were conscien- 
tiously tried by old man Hailey and Superintendent 
Brodie ; and Brodie, since he could do nothing else 
with him, finally kicked him into learning to read — 
and to cipher, Brodie called it. Then, by and by, 
Hailey got an old table and part of a cake of India ink 


72 Held for Orders 

himself, and himself becamea draughtsman, and soon, 
with some cursing from Brodie and a “ Luk a’ that 
now ! ’’ from his paralyzed daddy, became chief 
draughtsman in Brodie’s office. Hailey was no col- 
lege man — Hailey was a Brodie man. Single mind 
on single mind — concentration absolute. Mathe- 
matics, drawing, bridges, brains — that was Hailey. 
But no classics except Brodie, who himself was a 
classic. All that Brodie knew, Hailey had from him ; 
and where Brodie was weak, Hailey was strong — 
master of himself. When Brodie shamed the image 
he was made in, Hailey hid the shame best he could, 
— though never touched or made it his own — and 
Brodie, who hated even himself, showed still a light 
in the wreck by molding Hailey to his work. For, 
one day, said Brodie in his heart, this boy shall be 
master of these bridges. When I am rot, he will be 
here what I ought to have been — this Irish boy — 
and they will say he was Brodie’s man. And better 
than any of these dough-heads they send me out, 
better than any of their Eastern graduates he shall 
be, if he was made engineer by a drunkard. And 


The Roadmaster's Story 73 

Hailey was better, far, far better than the graduates, 
better than Brodie — and to Hailey came the time 
to wrestle the Spider. 

Stronger than any man before or since he was for 
that work. All Brodie knew, all the Indians knew, 
all that a life’s experience, eating, living, watching, 
sleeping with the big river had taught him, that 
Hailey knew. And when Brodie’s bridge went out, 
Hailey was ready with his new bridge for the Spider 
Water which should be better than Brodie’s, just as 
he was better than Brodie. It was to be such a bridge 
as Brodie’s bridge with the fire-water left out. And 
the plans for a Howe truss, two pier, two abutment, 
three span, pneumatic caisson bridge to span the Big 
Sandy River were submitted to headquarters. 

But the cost ! The directors, jumped their table 
when they saw the figures. We were being milked 
at that time — to put it bluntly, being sucked, worse 
than lemons — by a Wall Street clique that robbed 
our good road, shaved our salaries, impoverished our 
equipment, and cut our maintenance to the quick. 
They talked economy and studied piracy. In the 


Held for Orders 


74 

matter of appropriations, for themselves they were 
free-booters ; for us, they were thrifty as men of 
Hamelin town. When Hailey demanded a thousand 
guilders for his Spider Water bridge, they laughed and 
said, “ Come, take fifty.” He could n’t do anything 
else ; and he built a fifty guilder bridge to bar the 
Spider’s crawl. It lasted really better than the aver- 
age bridge and since Hailey never could get a thou- 
sand guilders at once, he kept drawing fifty at a time 
and throwing them annually at the Spider. 

But the dream of his life — this we all knew, and 
the Sioux would have said the Spider knew — was 
to build a final bridge over the Spider W ater : a bridge 
to throttle it for all time. 

It was the one subject on which you could get a rise 
out of Hailey any time, day or night, — the two pier, 
two abutment, three span, pneumatic caisson Spider 
bridge. He would talk Spider bridge to a China- 
man. His bridge foreman Ed Peeto, a staving big, 
one-eyed French Canadian, actually had but two 
ideas in life ; one was Hailey ; the other the Spider 
bridge. When the management changed again — 


The Roadmaster’s Story 75 

when the pirates were sent out on the plank so 
many good men had walked at their command — 
and a great and public-spirited man took control of 
the system, Ed Peeto kicked his little water spaniel 
in a frenzy of delight. “Now, Sport, old boy,’’ he 
exclaimed riotously, “ we ’ll get the bridge ! ” 

So there were many long conferences at division 
headquarters between Bucks, superintendent, and 
Callahan, assistant, and Hailey, superintendent of 
bridges, and after, Hailey went once more to general 
headquarters lugging all his estimates revised and all 
his plans refigured. All his expense estimates outside 
the Spider bridge and one other point were slight, 
because Hailey could skin along with less money 
than anybody ever in charge of the bridge work. 
He did it by keeping everything up; not a sleeper, 
not a spike — nothing got away from him. 

The new president, as befitted a very big man, was 
no end of a swell, and received Hailey with a con- 
siderate dignity unknown on our End. He listened 
carefully to the superintendent’s statement of the 
necessities at the Big Sandy River. The amount 


76 Held for Orders 

looked large ; but the argument, supported by a mass 
of statistics, was convincing. Three bridges in ten 
years, and the California fast freight business lost 
twice. Hailey’s budget called, too, for a new bridge 
at the Peace River — and a good one. Give him 
these, he said in effect, and he would guarantee the 
worst stretch on the system for a lifetime against tie- 
up disasters. Hailey stayed over to await the deci- 
sion ; but he was always in a hurry, and he haunted 
the general offices until the president told him he 
could have the money. To Hailey this meant, par- 
ticularly, the bridge of his dreams. The wire flashed 
the word to the W est End ; everybody at the Wickiup 
was glad ; but Ed Peeto burned red fire and his little 
dog Sport ate rattlesnakes. 

The old shack of a depot building that served as 
division headquarters at Medicine Bend we called 
the Wickiup. Everybody in it was crowded for 
room, and Hailey, whose share was what was left, 
had hard work to keep out of the wastebasket. But 
right away now it was different. Two extra offices 
were assigned to Hailey, and he took his place with 


The Roadmaster’s Story • 77 

those who sported windows and cuspidors — in a 
word, had departments in the service. Old Denis 
Hailey went very near crazy. He resigned as section 
boss and took a place at smaller wages in the bridge 
carpenter’s gang so he could work on the boy’s 
bridge, and Ed Peeto, savage with responsibility, 
strutted around the Wickiup like a cyclops. 

For a wonder the bridge material came in fast — 
the Spider stuff first — and early in the summer 
Hailey, very quiet, and Peeto, very profane, with all 
and several their traps and slaves and belongings 
moved into construction headquarters at the Spider, 
and the first airlock ever sunk west of the Missouri 
closed over the heads of tall Hailey and big Ed 
Peeto. Like a swarm of ants the bridge-workers 
cast the refuse up out of the Spider bed. The 
blow-pipes never slept : night and day the sand 
streamed from below, and Hailey’s caissons, like 
armed cruisers, sunk foot by foot towards the 
rock; by the middle of September the masonry 
was crowding high-water mark, and the following 
Saturday Hailey and Peeto ran back to Medicine 


78 Held for Orders 

Bend to rest up a bit and get acquainted with their 
families. Peeto was so deaf he could n’t hear 
himself swear, and Hailey looked ragged and thin, 
like the old depot, but immensely happy. 

Sunday morning counted a little even then in the 
mountains. It was at least a day to get your feet 
on the tables up in Bucks’s office and smoke Calla- 
han’s Cavendish — which was enough to make a 
man bless Callahan if he did forget his Maker. 
Sunday mornings Bucks would get out the dainty, 
pearl-handled Wostenholm that Lillienfeld, the big 
San Francisco spirit-shipper, left annually for him 
at the Bend, and open the R. R. B. mail and read 
the news aloud for the benefit of Callahan and 
Hailey and such hangers-on as Peeto and an occa- 
sional stray despatcher. 

“ Hello,” exclaimed Bucks, chucking a nine-inch 
official manila under the table, “ here ’s a general 
order — Number Fourteen ” 

The boys drew their briers like one. Bucks read 
out a lot of stuff that did n’t touch our End, and 
then he reached this paragraph : 


The Roadmaster’s Story 79 

“ ‘ The Mountain and the Inter-mountain divi- 
sions are hereby consolidated under the name of the 
Mountain Division with J. F. Bucks as Superin- 
tendent, headquarters at Medicine Bend. C. T. 
Callahan is .appointed Assistant Superintendent of 
the new division.’ ” 

“ Good boy ! ” roared Ed Peeto, straining his ears. 

‘‘Well, well, well,” said Hailey, opening his eyes, 
“ here *s promotions right and left.” 

“ ‘ H. P. Agnew is appointed Superintendent of 
bridges of the new division with headquarters at 
Omaha, vice P. C. Hailey,’ ” Bucks read on, with 
some little surprise growing into a shock. Then 
he read fast looking for some further mention of 
Hailey. Hailey promoted, transferred, assigned 
— but there was no further mention of Hailey in 
G. O. Number Fourteen. Bucks threw down the 
order in a silence. Ed Peeto broke out first. 

“ Who ’s H. P. Canoe ? ” 

“ Agnew.” 

“ Who the hell is he ? ” roared Ed. Nobody an- 
swered : nobody knew, Bucks attempted to talk j 


8o 


Held for Orders 


Callahan lit his lighted pipe ; but Ed Peeto stared 
at Hailey like a drunken man. 

“ Did you hear that ? ” he snorted at his superior. 

Hailey nodded. 

“ You ’re out ! ” stormed Peeto. 

Hailey nodded. The bridge foreman took his pipe 
from his mouth and dashed it into the stove. He 
got up and stamped across to the window and was 
like to have sworn the glass out before Hailey spoke. 

“I ’m glad we ’re up to high water at the Spider, 
Bucks,” said he at last. “ When they get in the 
Peace River work, the division will run itself for a 
year.” 

“ Hailey,” Bucks spoke slowly, “ I don’t need to 
tell you what I think of it, do I ? It ’s a damned 
shame. But it ’s what I ’ve said for a year — no- 
body ever knows what Omaha will do next.” 

Hailey rose to his feet. “ Where you going, 
Phil ? ” asked Bucks. 

“ Going back to the Spider on Number Two.” 

“ Not going back this morning — why don’t you 
wait for Four, to-night ? ” suggested Bucks. 


The Roadmaster's Story 8i 

“Ed,” Hailey raised his voice at the foreman, 
“ will you get those stay-bolts and chuck them into 
the baggage-car for me on Number Two ? I ’m 
going over to the house for a minute.” He forgot 
to answer Bucks ; they knew what it meant. He 
was bracing himself to tell the folks before he left 
them. Preparing to explain why he would n’t 
have the Sunday at home with the children. Pre- 
paring to tell the wife — and the old man — that 
he was out. Out of the railroad system he had 
given his life to help build up and make what it 
was. Out of the position he had climbed to by 
studying like a hermit and working like a hobo. 
Out — without criticism, or allegation, or reason 
— simply, like a dog, out. 

Nobody at the Wickiup wanted to hear the tel- 
ling over at the cottage ; nobody wanted to imagine 
the scene. As Number Two’s mellow chime 
whistle rolled down the gorge, they saw Hailey com- 
ing out of his house, his wife looking after him, 
and two little girls tugging at his arms as he hurried 
along ; old Denis behind, head down, carrying the 
6 


82 


Held for Orders 


boy’s shabby valise, trying to understand why the 
blow had fallen. 

That was what Callahan up with Bucks at 
the window was trying to figure — what it meant. 

“ The man that looks to Omaha for rhyme or 
reason will beggar his wits, Callahan,” said Bucks 
slowly, as he watched Ed Peeto swing the stay- 
bolts up into the car so they would crack the bag- 
gageman across the shins, and then try to get him 
into a fight about it. “They never had a man 
— and I bar none, no, not Brodie — that could 
handle the mountain-water like Hailey ; they 
never will have a man — and they dump him out 
like a pipe of tobacco. How does it happen we 
are cursed with such a crew of blooming idiots ? 
Other roads are n’t.” 

Callahan made no answer. “ I know why they 
did it,” Bucks went on, “ but I could n’t tell 
Hailey.” 

“ Why ? ” 

“ I think I know why. Last time I was down, 
the president brought his name up and asked a lot 


The Roadmaster's Story 83 

of questions about where he was educated and 
so on. Somebody had plugged him, I could see 
that in two minutes. I gave him the facts — told 
him that Brodie had given him his education as an 
engineer. The minute he found out he was n’t 
regularly graduated, he froze up. Very polite, but 
he froze up. See ? Experience, actual acquire- 
ments,” Bucks extended his hand from his vest 
pocket in an odd wavy motion till it was lost at 
arm’s length, ‘‘ nothing — nothing — nothing.” 

As he concluded, Hailey was climbing behind his 
father into the smoker; Number Two pulled 
down the yard and out ; one thing Hailey meant 
to make sure of — that they shouldn’t beat him 
out of the finish of the Spider bridge as he had 
planned it ; one monument Hailey meant to have 
— one he has. 

The new superintendent of bridges took hold 
promptly ; we knew he had been wired for long 
before his appointment was announced. He was 
a good enough fellow, I guess, but we all hated 
him. Bucks did the civil, though, and took Agnew 


84 Held for Orders 

down to the Spider in a special to inspect the new 
work and introduce him to the man whose bread 
and opportunity he was taking. “ I 've been 
wanting to meet you, Mr. Hailey,” said Agnew 
pleasantly after they had shaken hands. Hailey 
looked at Agnew silently as he spoke ; Bucks 
looked steadfastly at the grasshopper derrick. 

“ I Ve been expecting you ’d be along pretty 
soon,” replied Hailey presently. “ There ’s con- 
siderable to look over here. After that we ’ll go 
back to Peace River canon. We’re just getting 
things started there : then we ’ll run up to the Bend 
and I ’ll turn the office over.” 

‘‘ No hurry about that. You ’ve got a good deal 
of a bridge here, Mr. Hailey ? ” 

“ You ’ll need a good deal of a bridge here.” 

“ I did n’t expect to find you so far along out here 
in the mountains. Where did you get that pneu- 
matic process ? ” 

It touched Hailey, the pleasant, easy way Agnew 
took him. The courtesy of the east against the 
blunt of the west. There was n’t a mean drop 


The Roadmaster's Story 85 

anywhere in Hailey’s blood, and he made no trouble 
whatever for his successor. 

After he let go on the West End Hailey talked 
as if he would look up something further east. He 
spoke about it to Bucks, but Bucks told him frankly 
he would find difficulty without a regular degree 
in getting a satisfactory connection. Hailey him- 
self realized that ; moreover, he^ seemed reluctant 
to quit the mountains. He acted around the cot- 
tage and the Wickiup like a man who has lost 
something and who looks for it abstractedly — as 
one might feel in his pockets for a fishpole or a 
burglar. But there were lusty little Haileys over 
at the cottage to be looked after, and Bucks, losing 
a roadmaster about that time, asked Hailey (after 
chewing it a long time with Callahan) to take the 
place himself and stay on the staff. He even 
went home with Hailey and argued it. 

‘‘ I know it does n’t seem just right,” Bucks put 
it, “but, Hailey, you must remember this thing 
at Omaha isn’t going to last. They can’t run a 
road like this with Harvard graduates and Boston 


86 


Held for Orders 


typewriters- There ’ll be an entire new deal down 
there some fine day. Stay here with me, and I ’ll 
say this, Hailey, if I go, ever, you go with me.” 

And Hailey, sitting with his head between his 
hands, listening to his wife and to Bucks, said, one 
day, “Enough,” and the first of the month reported 
for duty as roadmaster. 

Agnew, meantime, had stopped all construction 
work not too far along to discontinue. The bridge 
at the Spider fortunately was beyond his mandate ; 
it was finished to a rivet as Hailey had planned it. 
Three spans, two piers, and a pair of abutments 

— solid as the Tetons. But the Peace River canon 
work was caught in the air. Hailey’s caissons 
gave way to piles which pulled the cost down from 
one hundred to seventy-five thousand dollars, and 
incidentally it was breathed that the day for ex- 
travagant expenditures on the West End was past 

— and Bucks dipped a bit deeper than usual into 
Callahan’s box of cross-cut, and rammed the 
splintered leaf into his. brier a bit harder and said 
no word. 


The Roadmaster’s Story 87 

“ But if we lose just one more bridge it ’s good- 
bye and gone to the California fast freight busi- 
ness,” muttered Callahan. “ It ’s taken two years 
to get it back as it is. Did you tell the president 
that ? ” he growled at Bucks, smoking. Bucks 
put out his little wave. 

“ 1 told him everything. I told him we could n’t 
stand another tie-up. I showed them all the re- 
cords. One bridge at Peace River, three at the 
Spider in ten years.” 

“ What did they say ? ” 

“ Said they had entire confidence in Agnew’s 
judgment; very eminent authority and that sort — 
new blood was making itself felt in every depart- 
ment ; that, of course, was fired at me ; but they 
heard all I intended to say, just the same. I asked 
the blooming board whether they wanted my resig- 
nation and — ” Bucks paused to laugh silently, 
“ the president invited me up to the Millard to dine 
with him. Hello, Phil Hailey ! ” he exclaimed as 
the new roadmaster walked in the door. “ Happy 
New Year. How ’s your culverts, old boy ? Ed 


88 


Held for Orders 


Peeto said yesterday the piles were going in down 
at Peace River.” 

“Just as good as concrete as long as they stay 
in,” smiled Hailey, “ and they do cost a heap less. 
This is great bridge weather — and for that matter 
great track weather.” 

We had no winter that year till spring ; and no 
spring till summer ; and it was a spring of snow 
and a summer of water. Down below, the plains 
were lost in the snow after Easter even, the snow 
that brought the Blackwood disaster with three 
engines and a rotary to the bad, not to speak of old 
man Sankey, a host in himself. After that the 
snow let up ; it was then no longer a matter of 
keeping the line clear; it was a matter of lashing 
the track to the right of way to keep it from swim- 
ming clear. Hailey had his hands full ; he caught 
it all the while and worse than anybody, but he 
worked like two men, for in a pinch that was his 
way. Bucks, irritable from repeated blows of for- 
tune, leaned on the wiry roadmaster as he did on 
Callahan or Neighbor. Hailey knew Bucks looked 


The Roadmaster’s Story 89 

to him for the track and he strained every nerve 
making ready for the time the mountain snows 
shoujd go out. 

There was nobody easy on the West End : and 
least of all Hailey, for that spring, ahead of the 
suns, ahead of the thaws, ahead of the waters, 
came a going out that unsettled the oldest calcu- 
lator in the Wickiup. Brodie’s old friends began 
coming out of the upper country, out of the Spider 
valley. Over the Eagle pass and through the Peace 
canon the Sioux came in parties and camps and 
tribes — out and down and into the open country. 
And Bucks stayed them and talked with them. 
Talked the great White Father and the Ghost dance 
and the Bad Agent. But the Sioux grunted and 
did not talk ; they traveled. Then Bucks spoke 
of good hunting, far, far south ; if they were uneasy 
Bucks was willing they should travel far, for it 
looked like a rising. Some kind of a rising it must 
have been to take the Indians out of winter quarters 
at such a time. After Bucks, Hailey tried, and the 
braves listened for they knew Hailey and when he 


Held for Orders 


90 

accused them of fixing for fight they shook their 
heads, denied, and turned their faces to the moun- 
tains. They stretched their arms straight out under 
their blankets like stringers and put out their palms, 
downward, and muttered to Hailey. 

“ Plenty snow.” 

“ I reckon they ’re lying,” said Bucks, listening. 
‘‘There ’s some deviltry up. They ’re not the kind 
to clear out for snow.” 

Hailey made no comment. Only looked thought- 
fully at the ponies shambling along, the squaws 
trudging, the braves loitering to ask after the fire- 
water chief who slept under a cairn of stones off 
the right of way above the yard. Bucks did n’t 
believe it. He could fancy rats deserting a sink- 
ing ship, because he had read of such things — but 
Indians clearing out for snow ! 

“ Not for snow, nor for water,” muttered Bucks, 
“ unless it ’s fire-water.” And once more the red 
man was misunderstood. 

Now the Spider wakes regularly twice ; at all 
other times irregularly. Once in April ; that is 


The Roadmaster’s Story 91 

the foothills water : once in June ; that is the moun- 
tain water. And the June rise is like this^ 

But the April rise is like this — . 

Now came an April without any rise ; that April 
nothing rose — except the snow. “We shall get 
it all together,” suggested Bucks one night. 

Or will it get us altogether? ” asked Hailey. 

“ Either way,” said Callahan, “ it will be mostly 
at once.” 

May opened bleaker than April ; even the track- 
men walked with set faces ; the dirtiest half-breed 
on the line knew now what the mountains held. 
At last, while we looked and wondered, came a very 
late Chinook ; July in May ; then the water. 


II 

S ECTION gangs were doubled and track- 
walkers put on. By-passes were opened, 
bridge crews strengthened, everything 
buckled for grief. Gullies began to race, culverts to 
choke, creeks to tumble, rivers to madden. F rom the 


Held for Orders 


92 

Muddy to the Summit the water courses swelled and 
boiled — all but the Spider ; the big river slept. 
Through May and into June the Spider slept ; but 
Hailey was there at the Wickiup, always, and with 
one eye running over all the line, one eye turned 
always to the Spider where two men and two, night 
and day, watched the lazy surface water trickle over 
and through the vagabond bed between Hailey’s 
monumental piers. Never an hour did the operat- 
ing department lose to the track. East and west 
of us railroads everywhere clamored in despair. 
The flood reached from the Rockies to the Alle- 
ghenies. Our trains never missed a trip ; our 
schedules were unbroken ; our people laughed ; we 
got the business, dead loads of it j our treasury 
flowed over ; and Hailey watched ; and the Spider 
slept. 

Big Ed Peeto, still foreman of the bridges, hung 
on Hailey’s steps and tried with his staring, swear- 
ing eye to make it all out ; to guess what Hailey 
expected to happen, for it was plain he was think- 
ing. Whether smoking or speaking, whether wak- 


The Roadmaster's Story 93 

ing or sleeping, he was thinking. And as May turned 
soft and hot into June with every ditch bellying and 
the mountains still buried, it put us all thinking. 

On the 30th there was trouble beyond Wild Hat 
and all our extra men, put out there under Hailey, 
were fighting to hold the Rat valley levels where 
they hug the river on the west slope. It was n’t 
really Hailey’s track. Bucks sent him over there 
because he sent Hailey wherever the Emperor sent 
Ney. Sunday while Hailey was at Wild Hat it 
began raining. Sunday it rained. Monday it 
rained all through the mountains; Tuesday it was 
raining from Omaha to Eagle pass, with the ther- 
mometer climbing for breath and the barometer 
flat as an adder — and the Spider woke. 

Woke with the April water and the June water 
and the rain water all at once. Trackmen at the 
bridge Tuesday night flagged Number One and re- 
ported the river wild, and sheet ice running. A 
wire from Bucks brought Hailey out of the west 
and into the east ; and brought him to reckon for 
the last time with his ancient enemy. 


Held for Orders 


94 

He was against it Wednesday morning with dyna- 
mite. All the day, the night and the next day the 
sullen roar of the giant powder shook the ice-jams. 
Two days more he spent there watching, with only 
an occasional thunderbolt to heave and scatter the 
Spider water into sudden, shivery columns of spray ; 
then he wired, ‘‘ ice out,” and set back dragged 
and silent for home and for sleep — ten hours out 
of two hundred, maybe, was all he reckoned to the 
good when he struck a pillow again. Saturday 
night he slept and Sunday all day and Sunday night. 
Monday about noon Bucks sent up to ask, but Hailey 
was asleep ; they asked back by the lad whether 
they should wake him; Bucks sent word, “No.” 

Tuesday morning the tall roadmaster came 
down fresh as sunshine and all day he worked with 
Bucks and the despatchers watching the line. The 
Spider raced like the Missouri, and the men at 
the bridge sent in panic messages every night and 
morning, but Hailey lit his pipe with their alarms. 
“ That bridge will go when the mountains go,” 
was all he said. 


The Roadmaster’s Story 95 

Tuesday was his wedding date, old Denis told 
Peeto; it was Hailey’s wooden wedding, and when he 
found everybody knew they were going to have a lit- 
tle spread over at the cottage, Hailey invited the boys 
up for the evening. Just a little celebration, Hailey 
said, and everybody he spoke wrung his hand and 
slapped his iron shoulders till Hailey echoed good 
cheer through and through. Callahan was going 
over; Bucks had promised to look in, and Ed Peeto 
and the boys had a little surprise for Hailey, had it 
in the dark of the baggage-room in the Wickiup, a 
big Morris chair. No one would ever guess how 
it landed at Medicine Bend, but it was easy. Ed 
Peeto had pulled it badly demoralized out of a 
freight wreck at the Sugar Buttes and done it over 
in company screws and varnish to surprise Hailey. 
The anniversary made it just right, very hot stuff, 
Ed Peeto said, and the company had undoubtedly 
paid a claim voucher, for it — or would. 

It was nine o’clock, night, and every star blink- 
ing when Hailey looked in again at the office for 
the track-walkers’ reports and the Railway weather 


g6 Held for Orders 

bulletins. Bucks, Callahan, and Peeto sat about 
DufFy, who in his shirt-sleeves threw the stuff out 
ofF the sounder as it trickled in dot and dash, dot 
and dash over the wires. The west wire was good 
but east everything below Peace River was down. 
We had to get the eastern reports around by Omaha 
and the south — a good thousand miles of a loop — 
but bad news travels even round a Robin Hood loop. 

And Wild Hat came first from the west with a 
stationary river and the Loup creek falling — clear 
— good night. And Ed Peeto struck the table 
heavily and swore it was well in the west. Then 
from the east came Prairie Portage, all the way round, 
with a northwest rain, a rising river, and anchor ice 
pounding the piers badly, track in fair shape and — 
and — 

The wire went wrong. As DufFy knit his eyes 
and tugged and cussed a little the wind outside took 
up the message and whirled a bucket of rain against 
the windows. But the wires would n’t right and stuff 
that no man could get tumbled in like a dictionary 
upside down. And Bucks and Callahan and Hailey 


The Roadmaster’s Story 97 

and Peeto smoked, silent, and listened to the deepen- 
ing drum of the rain on the roof. 

Then Duffy wrestled mightily yet once more, 
and the long way came word of trouble in the Omaha 
yards with the river at twenty-two feet and cutting ; 
rising at Bismarck one foot an hour. 

“ Hell to pay on the Missouri, of course,” growled 
the foreman, staring single-eyed at the inoffensive 
bulletin. ‘‘ Well, she don’t run our way; let her 
boil, damn her.” 

Keep still,” exclaimed Duffy, leaning heavily 
on the key. “Here’s something — from — the 
Spider.” 

Only the hum of the rain and the nervous break of 
the sounder cut the smoke that curled from the pipes. 
Duffy snatched a pen and ran it across a clip, and 
Bucks leaning over read aloud from his shoulder : 

“ Omaha. 

“J.F. Bucks. — Trainmen from Number Seventy- 
Five stalled west of Rapid City — track afloat in 
Simpson’s cut — report Spider bridge out send — ” 

And the current broke. 


7 


98 Held for Orders 

Callahan’s hand closed rigidly over his pipe; Peeto 
sat speechless ; Bucks read again at the broken 
message, but Hailey sprang like a man wounded and 
snatched the clip from his superintendent’s hand. 

He stared at the running words till they burnt 
his eyes and then, with an oath, frightful as the thun- 
der that broke down the mountains, he dashed the 
clip to the floor. His eyes snapped greenish with 
fury and he cursed Omaha, cursed its messages 
and everything that came out of it. Slow at first, 
but bitter, then fast and faster until all the sting 
that poisoned his heart in his unjust discharge poured 
from his lips. It flooded the room like a spilling 
stream and no man put a word against it for they 
knew he stood a wronged man. Out it came — 
all the rage — all the heart-burning — all the bitter- 
ness — and he dropped, bent, into a chair and cov- 
ered his face with his hands : only the sounder click- 
ing iron jargon and the thunder shaking the W ickiup 
like a reed filled the ears about him. They watched 
him slowly knot his fingers and loosen them, and saw 
his face rise dry and hard and old out of his hands. 


The Roadmaster’s Story 99 

“ Get up an engine ! ” 

“Not — you ’re not going down there to-night ? ” 
stammered Bucks. 

“Yes. Now. Right ofF. Peeto ! Get out 
your crew ! ” 

The foreman jumped for the door ; Bucks hesi- 
tated barely an instant, then turning where he sat cut 
a telephone plug into the roundhouse ; Callahan 
saw him act and leaning forward spoke low to Duffy. 
7Te despatcher snatching the train sheet began in- 
stantly clearing track for a bridge special. 

In twenty minutes twenty men were running 
twenty ways through the storm and a live engine 
boomed under the Wickiup windows. 

“ Phil, I want you to be careful ! ” It was Bucks 
standing by the roadmaster’s side at the window 
as they looked out into the storm. “ It ’s a bad 
night.” Hailey made no answer. “ A wicked 
night,” muttered Bucks as the lightning shot the 
yards in a blaze and a crash rolled down the gorge. 
But wicked as it was he could not bring himself to 
countermand ; something forbade it. Evans the 
conductor of the special ran in. 

LofC. 


lOO Held for Orders 

“ Here ’s your orders ! ” exclaimed DufFy. Evans 
pulling down his storm cap nodded as he took the 
tissue. Hailey buttoned his leather jacket and turned 
to Bucks. 

“ Good-by.” 

“ Mind your track,” said Bucks, warningly to 
Evans as he took Hailey’s hand. “ What ’s your 
permit ? ” 

“Forty miles an hour.” 

“ Don’t stretch it. Good-by, Phil,” he added, 
speaking to Hailey. “ I ’ll see you in the morning.” 

“ In the morning,” repeated Hailey. “ Good- 
by. Nothing more in, Duffy ? ” 

“ Nothing more.” 

“ Come on ! ” With the words he pushed the con- 
ductor through the door and was gone. The switch 
engine puffed up with the caboose. Ahead of it 
Ed Peeto had coupled in the pile driver. At the 
last minute Callahan asked to go, and as the bridge 
gang tumbled into the caboose, the assistant super- 
intendent, Ed Peeto, and Hailey climbed into the 
engine. Denis Mullenix sat on the right and with 


The Roadmaster’s Story loi 

William Durden, fireman, they pulled out, five in 
the cab, for the Spider Water. 

From Medicine Bend to the Spider Water is a 
ninety mile run ; down the gorge, through the foot- 
hills and into the Painted Desert that fills the jaw 
of the spur we intersect again west of Peace River. 
From the Peace to the Spider the crow flies twenty 
miles, but we take thirty for it ; there is hardly a 
tangent between. Their orders set a speed limit, 
but from the beginning they crowded it. Hailey, 
moody at first, began joking and laughing the minute 
they got away. He sat behind Denis Mullenix 
on the right and poked at his ribs and taunted him 
with his heavy heels. After a bit he got down and 
threw coal for Durden, mile after mile, and 
crowded the boiler till the safety screamed. 
When Durden took the shovel Hailey put his hand 
on the shoulder of Callahan, who was trying to hang 
to big Ed Peeto on the fireman’s seat. 

“ Callahan,” he yelled in his ear, “ a man ’s better 

off ” And Callahan, though he could n’t, in 

the pound and the roar, catch the words, nodded 


102 


Held for Orders 


and laughed because Hailey fiercely laughed. Then 
going around to the right the roadmaster covered 
Denis Mullenix’s fingers on .the throttle latch and 
the air with his big hands and good-naturedly coaxed 
them loose, pushed the engineer back and got the 
whip and the reins into his own keeping. It was 
what he wanted, for he smiled as he drew out the 
bar a notch and settled himself for the run across 
the flat country. They were leaving the foothills, 
and when the lightning opened the night they could 
see behind through the blasting rain the great hulk- 
ing pile driver nod and reel out into the Painted 
Desert like a drunken man ; for Hailey’s schedule 
was the wind and his limit the wide throttle. 

The storm shook them with freshening fury and 
drove the flanges into the south rail with a grinding 
shriek, as they sped from the shelter of the hills. 
The rain fell in a sheet, and the right of way ran 
a river. The wind, whipping the water oflF the 
ballast, dashed it like hail against the cab glass ; the 
segment of desert caught in the yellow of the head- 
light rippled and danced and swam in the storm 


The Roadmaster’s Story 103 

water, and Hailey pulled again at the straining throttle 
and latched it wider. Callahan hung with a hand 
to a brace and a hand to Peeto, and every little 
while looked back at the caboose dancing a horn- 
pipe over the joints ; Mullenix, working the injec- 
tor, stared astonished at Hailey ; but Durden grimly 
sprinkled new blood into the white furnace and eyed 
his stack. 

Notch after notch Hailey drew, heedless of lurch 
and jump ; heedless of bed or curve ; heedless of 
track or storm ; and with every spur at her cylin- 
ders the engine shook like a frantic horse. Men 
and monster alike lost thought of care and drunk 
a frenzy in the deafening whirl that Hailey opened 
across the swimming plain. 

The Peace River hills loomed into the headlight 
like moving pictures ; before they could think it, the 
desert was behind. Callahan, white-faced, climbed 
down, and passed from hand to hand by Durden and 
Mullenix got his hands on Hailey’s shoulders and 
his lips to his ear. 

“ For God’s sake, Phil, let up ! ” 


104 Held for Orders 

Hailey nodded and choked the steam a little. 
Threw a hatful of air on the shoes, but more as a 
test than a check : the fire was in his blood and he 
slewed into the hills with a speed unslackened. 
From th^ rocks it is a down grade all the way to the 
canon, and the wind blew them and the track pulled 
them and a frenzied man sat at the throttle. Just 
where the line crosses Peace River the track bends 
sharply in through the Needles to take the bridge. 

The curve is a ten degree. As they struck it, the 
headlight shot far out upon the river — and they in 
the cab knew they were dead men. Instead of 
lighting the box of the truss the lamp lit a black and 
snaky flood sweeping over the abutment with yel- 
low foam. The Peace had licked up Agnew^s 
thirty-foot piles and his bridge was not. 

Whatever could be done — and Hailey knew all 
— meant death to the cab. Denis Mullenix never 
moved ; no man that knew Hailey would think of 
trying to supplant him even with death under the 
ponies. He did what a man could do. There was 
no chance anyway for the cab : but the caboose 
held twenty of his faithful men. 


The Roadmaster’s Story 105 

He checked — and with a scream from the flanges 
the special, shaking in the clutches of the air-brake, 
swung the curve. 

Again, the roadmaster checked heavily. The 
leads of the pile driver swaying high above gravity 
center careened for an instant wildly to the tangent, 
then the monster machine, parting from the tender, 
took the elevation like a hurdle and shot into the 
trees, dragging the caboose after it. But engine and 
tender and five in the cab plunged head on into the 
Peace. 

Not a man in the caboose was killed ; it was as 
if Hailey had tempered the blow to its crew. They 
scrambled out of the splinters and on their feet, men 
and ready to do. One voice from below came 
to them through the storm, and they answered its 
calling. It was Callahan j but Durden, Mullenix, 
Peeto, Hailey, never called again. 

At daybreak wreckers of the West End, swarm- 
ing from mountain and plain, were heading for the 
Peace, and the McCloud gang — up — crossed the 
Spider on Hailey’s bridge — on the bridge the coward 


io6 Held for Orders 

trainmen had reported out, quaking as they did in 
the storm at the Spider foaming over its approaches. 
But Hailey’s bridge stood — stands to-day. 

Yet three days the Spider raged, and knew then 
its master, while he, three whole days sat at the bot- 
tom of the Peace clutching the engine levers in the 
ruins of Agnew’s mistake. 

And when the divers got them up, Callahan and 
Bucks tore big Peeto’s arms from his master’s body 
and shut his staring eye and laid him at his master’s 
side. And only the Spider ravening at Hailey’s 
caissons raged. But Hailey slept. 


I 







■ «: 

• , 
r 

I 






I 






•r * ’• 




i 





f 




I 


9 


■t 


• . ’ 


3 , 


M 


I 




I 


} 




[ 



A 




A 


« 



1 


K 


I 


4 


4 


4 


4 




^ • I 




« 

f 


ft 


t 




I 


s 


I 


I 


( 




* 


t 


■ 





t 


9 


I 


f~ 


♦ » « 



I 







/ - 



I 




• • 




M’Terza 




* 



WTWw7 


Held for Orders 

The Striker’s Story 


McTERZA 










The Striker’s Story 

¥- 

McTERZA 

I WOULD not call her common. Not that I 
would be afraid to, though most of the boys 
were more or less afraid of Mrs. Mullenix, 
but simply that it would n’t be right — not in my 
opinion. 

She kept a short order house, let that be admitted 
at once, but her husband was long a West End engi- 
neer. Denis Mullenix went into the Peace with 
Hailey and Ed Peeto and Durden the night of the 
big June water on the West End. The company 
did n’t treat her just right. I was a strong company 
man, although I went out with the boys. But I 
say, and I ’ve always said, the company did not treat 
Mrs. Mullenix just right. 


I lO 


Held for Orders 


A widow, and penniless, she bought the eating- 
house at McCloud with the few hundreds they gave 
her. 

There were five young Mullenixes, and they were, 
every one, star children, from Sinkers, who was foxy, 
to Kate, who was not merely fine, she was royal. 
Twenty, and straight, and true, with a complexion 
like sunrise and hair like a sunset. Kate kept the 
cottage going, and Mrs. Mullenix ruled personally 
in the eating-house and in the short order annex. 
Any one that has tasted a steak grilled swell in 
Chicago or in Denver, and tasted one broiled plain 
by Mrs. Mullenix in McCloud, half a block from 
the depot, can easily understand why the boys be- 
haved well. As for her colFee, believe it or not, 
we owe most of our world-famous West End runs, 
not so much to the Baldwin Locomotive Works, 
renowned as they are, nor to Mr. George Westing- 
house, prince of inventors though we rank him — 
but to the coffee drawn by Mrs. Mary Mullenix ; 
honor where honor is due. 

Mrs. Mullenix’s colfee for many years made the 


The Striker’s Story 1 1 1 

boys hot : what now makes them hot is that she 
can’t be persuaded to draw it for anybody except 
McTerza, and they claim that’s the way he holds 
the Yellow Mail with the 808 ; but all the same 
McTerza is fast stuff, coffee or no coffee. 

They were none of them boisterous men, those 
Reading engineers who took our jobs after the strike; 
but McTerza was an oyster, except that he could n’t 
be swallowed. 

McTerza did n’t give up very much to anybody; 
not even to his own chums, Foley and Sinclair. 
The fact is he was diffident, owing, maybe, to a hesi- 
tation in his speech. It was funny, the bit of a halt, 
but not so odd as his disposition, which approached 
that of a grizzly. He had impudence and indiffer- 
ence and quiet — plenty of each. 

There was one place up street that was, in spe- 
cial and particular, headquarters for the bad men in 
our crowd — for we had some — Gatling’s billiard 
hall. Foley himself never had the nerve to tackle 
Gatling’s. But one night, all alone and come from 
nobody knew where, the hall stuffed with striking 


I 12 


Held for Orders 


men who had tasted blood that very day — McT erza 
walked^^ Gatling’s. 

It was like a yearling strolling into a canon full 
of wolves. They were so surprised at first they 
couldn’t bite, but pretty soon they got McTerza 
up against^ a mirror and began pasting pool balls at 
him. y 

When Ed Banks arrived it was as bad as a rapid- 
fire gun, and he carried McTerza out the side door 
like a warm tapioca pudding. When the fellow got 
round again, though, he was just as careless as ever. 

It was pretty generally understood that in the 
strike the short order house was with us. Mrs. 
Mullenix had reason to feel bitter toward the com- 
pany, and it became speedily known that Mrs. 
Mullenix’s was not a healthy place for the men 
who took our engines ; their money was not wanted. 
In fact, none of the new men ever tried to get 
service there except McTerza. McTerza one 
morning dropped into the short order house. 

“ Coffee,” said he ; he always cut things short 
because he was afraid he would get hung up between 


The Striker’s Story 1 1 3 

stations in remarks. Mrs. Mullenix, sick, had to 
manage as she could. Kate was looking after 
things that day at the restaurant, and she was 
alone. She looked at McTerza chillingly. Kate 
had more than enough instinct to tell a Reading 
man from the Brotherhood type. She turned in 
silence, and she poured a cup of coffee, but from 
the night tank : it was the grossest indignity that 
could be perpetrated on a man in the short order 
management. She set it with little of civility and 
less of sugar before McTerza, and pushing her 
girdle down, coldly walked front, half perched on 
a stool, and looked listlessly out the window. 

‘‘ Cool,” ventured McTerza as he stirred a lump 
of sugar hopefully into his purchase. Kate made 
no comment on the observation ; the thing appeared 
self-evident. 

‘‘ Could I have a little c-c-condensed milk ? ” 
inquired McTerza presently. This sc-sc-scream 
looks pretty rich,” he added, stirring thoughtfully as 
he spoke at the pot of mustard, which was the only 
liquid in sight. 


8 


Held for Orders 


114 

Kate Mullenix glared contemptuously at him, but 
she passed out a jug of cream — and it was cream. 
From the defiance on her face as she resumed her 
attitude she appeared to expect a protest about the 
cold coffee. None came. McTerza drank the 
stuff very slowly, blowing it carefully the while 
as if it was burning him up. It vexed Kate. 

“ How much ? ” asked McTerza humbly, as he 
swallowed the last drop before it froze to the spoon, 
and fished for a dime to square his account. 

“Twenty-five cents.” He started slightly but 
reached again into his pocket and without a word 
produced a quarter. Kate swept it into the drawer 
with the royal indifference of a circus faker and 
resumed her stool. 

“ C-c-could I get another c-c-cup ? ” asked 
McTerza patiently. It looked like a defiance; 
however she boldly poured a second cup of the 
cold coffee, and McTerza tackled it. 

After an interval of silence he spoke again. 
“ Do you sell tickets on c-coffee here ? ” She 
looked at him with a questioning insolence. “ I 


The Striker’s Story 1 1 5 

mean, c-could a fellow buy a chance — or get into 
a raffle — on the h-h-h-hot tank ? ” asked McTerza, 
throwing a sad glance on the live coffee urn, which 
steamed cozily beside its silent companion. 

‘‘ That tank is empty,’’ snapped Kate Mullenix 
recklessly, for in spite of herself she was getting 
confused. 

“ If it is,” suggested McTerza, peering gravely 
underneath at the jet of gas that blazed merrily, 
“ you ought to draw your fire : you ’re liable to 
b-b-burn your c-c-crown-sheet.” 

“ What ’s the matter ? ” demanded Kate angrily ; 
“ is your coffee cold ? ” 

“ Oh, no,” he responded, shaking his head and 
waiting for the surprising disclaimer to sink in. 
“ Not exactly cold. It ’s just dead.” 

“We don’t serve Reading men here,” retorted 
Kate defiantly. 

“Oh, yes, you do,” responded McTerza, 
brightening at once. “You serve them like 
t-t-tramps.” Then after a pause : “ Could I get 
a cigar ? ” 


1 16 Held for Orders 

“ Yes.” 

“ How much is that kind ? ” 

“ Fifty cents,” snapped Kate, glancing into the 
street for some friendly striker to appear. 

‘‘ I want a good one.” 

“ That ’s a good one.” 

“ Fifty cents a b-b-box ? ” 

“ Fifty cents apiece.” 

“ Give me a small one, please.” 

He put down a dollar bill as he took the cigar. 
She threw a half back on the case. At that mo- 
ment in walked two of our boys, Curtis Rucker 
and Ben Nicholson. McTerzahad a great chance 
to walk out, but he did n’t improve it. Rucker 
and Ben were Reds, both of them. Ben, in fact, 
was an old terror at best. Curtis Rucker was a 
blackish, quick young fellow, fine as silk in a cab, 
but a devil in a strike, and what was more, a great 
admirer of Kate Mullenix, and the minx knew it. 
As McTerza bit off the end of his cigar and reached 
for the gas-lighter he noticed that her face lighted 
wonderfully. 


The Striker's Story 117 

With a smile the newcomers called for coffee, 
and with a smile they got it. McTerza, smoking 
quietly at the cigar-case, watched the steaming 
liquid pour from the empty tank. It was a dis- 
piriting revelation, but he only puffed leisurely on. 
When Kate glanced his way, as she presently did, 
disdainfully, McTerza raised his finger, and pointed 
to the change she had thrown at him. 

“ What is it, sir ? ’’ 

‘‘ Mistake.” 

The strikers pricked up their ears. 

“ There is n’t any mistake, sir. I told you the 
cigars were fifty cents each,” replied Kate Mullenix. 
Rucker pushed back his coffee, and sliding off his 
stool walked forward. 

‘‘ Change is n’t right,” persisted McTerza, look- 
ing at Kate Mullenix. 

“ Why not ? ” 

“ You forgot to take out twenty-five cents more 
for that last cup of c-c-coffee,” stammered the 
Reading man. Kate took up the coin and handed 
a quarter back from the register. 


ii8 


Held for Orders 


“ That ’s right,” put in Rucker promptly, “ make 
the scabs p-p-pay for what they g-g-get. They ’re 
sp-p-p-pending our money.” The hesitating Read- 
ing man appeared for the first time aware of an 
enemy ; interested for the first time in the abuse 
that had been continually heaped on him since 
he came to town : it appeared at last to reach 
him. He returned Rucker’s glare. 

“ You call me a scab, do you ? ” he said at last 
and with the stutter all out. “ I belong to a labor 
order that counts thousands to your hundreds. 
Your scabs came in and took our throttles on the 
Reading — why should n’t we pull your latches out 
here? Your strike is beat, my buck, and Reading 
men beat it. You had better look for a job on a 
threshing machine.” 

Rucker jumped for McTerza, and they mixed 
like clouds in a cyclone. For a minute it was a 
whirlwind, and nothing could be made of it ; but 
when they could be seen McTerza had the best 
man in our camp pinned under a table with his 
throat in one hand like the latch of a throttle. 


The Striker's Story 1 19 

Nicholson at the same moment raising an oak stool 
smashed it over McTerza’s head. The fellow 
went flat as a dead man, but he must have pulled 
up quick, for when Neighbor, rushing in, whirled 
Nicholson into the street, the Reading man already 
had his feet, and a corner to work from. Reed, 
the trainmaster, was right behind the big master 
mechanic. Rucker was up, but saw he was out- 
numbered. 

“ Hurt, Mac ? ” asked Reed, running toward the 
Reading man. The blow had certainly dazed him ; 
his eyes rolled seasick for a minute, then he stared 
straight ahead. 

“ Look out,” he muttered, pointing over Reed’s 
shoulder at Kate Mullenix, ‘‘ she ’s going to 
faint.” The trainmaster turned, but Kate was 
over before her brother Sinkers could reach her 
as he ran in. Rucker moved towards the door. 
As he passed McTerza he sputtered villanously, 
but Neighbor’s huge bulk was between the two 
men. 

“ Never mind,” retorted McTerza; ‘‘ next time 


120 Held for Orders 

I get you I ’ll ram a billiard c-c-c-cue down your 

throat.” 

It was the first intimation our fighting men had 
that the Reading fellow could do business, and the 
affair caused McTerza to be inspected with some 
interest from behind screens and cracker boxes as 
he sauntered up and down the street. When the 
boys asked him what he was going to do about his 
treatment in the short order house he seemed in- 
different ; but the indifference, as our boys were 
beginning to find out, covered live coals ; for when 
he was pressed he threw the gauntlet at the whole 
lodge of us, by saying that before he got through 
he would close the short order house up. That 
threat made him a marked man. The Reading 
men were hated ; McTerza was slated for the very 
worst of it. Everybody on both sides understood 
that — except McT erza himself. He never under- 
stood anything, for that matter, till it was on him, 
and he dropped back into his indifference and 
recklessness almost at once. He even tried the 
short order house again. That time Mrs. Mullenix 


The Striker’s Story 121 

herself was in the saddle. There were things in 
life which even McTerza did n’t hanker after tack- 
ling more than once, and one was a second interview 
with Mrs. Mullenix. But the fellow must have 
made an impression on even the redoubtable Mrs. 
Mary, for she privately asked Neighbor, as one 
might of an honorable adversary, for peace’ sake 
to keep that man away from her restaurant ; so 
McTerza was banned. He took his revenge by 
sauntering in and out of Gatling’s, until Gatling 
himself went gray-headed with the fear that another 
riot would be brought on his place. 

Oddly enough, McTerza had one friend in the 
Mullenix family. On the strike question, like 
many other McCloud families, the house of Mul- 
lenix was divided against itself. All held for the 
engineers except the youngest member. Sinkers. 
Sinkers was telegraph messenger, and was strictly 
a company man in spite of everything. He natu- 
rally saw a great deal of the new men, but Sinkers 
never took the slightest interest in McTerza till 
he handled Rucker ; after that Sinkers cultivated 


I 22 


Held for Orders 


him. Sinkers would listen just as long as McTerza 
would stutter, and they became fast friends long 
before the yard riots. 

The day the carload of detectives was imported 
the fight was on. Scattering collisions breaking 
here and there into open fights showed the feeling, 
but it was n’t till Little Russia went out that things 
looked rocky for the company property at McCloud. 
Little Russia had become a pretty big Russia at the 
time of the strike. The Russians, planted at Ben- 
kleton you might say by Shockley, had spread up and 
down the line like tumbleweeds, and their first 
cousins, the Polacks, worked the company coal 
mines. At McCloud thev were as hard a crowd 
after dark as you would find on the steppes. The 
Polacks, four hundred of them, struck while the 
engineers were out, and the fat went into the fire 
with a flash. 

The night of the trouble took even us by surprise, 
and the company was wholly unprepared. The 
engineers in the worst of the heat were accused of 


The Striker’s Story 123 

the rioting, but we had no more to do with it than 
homesteaders. Our boys are Americans, and we 
don’t fight with torches and kerosene. We don’t 
have to ; they ’re not our weapons. The company 
imported the Polacks, let them settle their own ac- 
counts with them, said our fellows, and I called it 
right. Admitting that some of our Reds got out to 
mix in it, we could n’t in sense be held for that. 

It was Neighbor, the craftiest old fox on the staff 
of the division, who told the depot people in the 
afternoon that something was coming, and thinking 
back afterward of the bunches of the low-browed 
fellows dotting the bench and the bottoms in front 
of their dugouts, lowering at the guards who patrolled 
the railroad yards, it was strange no one else saw it. 
They had been out three weeks, and after no end 
of gabbling turned silent. Men that talk are not 
so dangerous ; it ’s when they quit talking. 

Neighbor was a man of a thousand to act on his 
apprehension. All the afternoon he had the switch 
engines shunting cars about the roundhouse ; the 
minute the arc lights went on the result could be 


Held for Orders 


124 

seen. The old man had long lines of furniture- 
vans, box cars, gondolas, and dead Pullmans strung 
around the big house like parapets. Whatever any- 
body else thought. Neighbor was ready. Even old 
John Boxer, his head blacksmith, who operated an 
amateur battery for salutes and celebrations, had his 
gun overhauled : the roundhouse was looking for 
trouble. 

It was barely eight o’clock that night when a 
group of us on Main Street saw the depot lights go 
out, and pretty soon telephone messages began 
coming in to Gatling’s from the company plant up 
the river for the sheriff ; the Polacks were wrecking 
the dynamos. The arc lights covering the yards 
were on a different circuit, but it did n’t take the 
whiskered fellows long to find that out. Half an 
hour later the city plant was attacked ; no one was 
looking for trouble there, and the great system of 
arcs lighting the yard for miles died like fireflies. 
We knew then, everybody knew, that the Polacks 
meant business. 

Not a man was in sight when the blaze sputtered 


The Striker’s Story 125 

blue, red, and black out ; but in five minutes a dozen 
torches were moving up on the in-freight house like 
coyotes. We could hear the crash of the big oak 
doors clear down on Main Street. There, again, 
the company was weak; they had n’t a picket out 
at either of the freight houses. There was n’t so 
much as a sneeze till they beat the doors inj then 
there was a cry; the women were taking a hand, 
and it was a loot with a big L. The plunder mad- 
dened them like brandy. Neighbor, who feared 
not the Polacks nor the devil, made a sortie with a 
dozen men from his stockade, for that was what the 
roundhouse defenses looked like, to try to save the 
building. It was n’t in men to do it. The gutting 
was done and the kerosene burning yellow before 
he was half-way across, and the mob, running then 
in a wavering black line from the flames that licked 
the high windows, were making for the storehouse. 
The fellows were certainly up to everything good, 
for in plundering the freight house first they gave 
their women the chance to lay in supplies for months. 
Neighbor saw in a minute there was nothing left 


Held for Orders 


1 26 

for him to protect at the east end, and before he 
could cut off the constantly lengthening line of 
rioters, they were between him and the long store- 
house. It must have made the old man weep blood, 
and it was there that the first shooting occurred. 

A squad of the detectives reenforcing Neighbor’s 
little following, ran in on the flank of the rioters 
as the master mechanic caught up with their rear. 
They wheeled, on his command to disperse, and 
met it with a cloud of stones and coupling pins. 
The detectives opened with their Winchesters, and 
a yell went up that took me back to the Haymarket. 
Their answer was the torch to the storehouse and 
a charge on the imported guards that shook their 
front like a whirlwind. The detectives ran for 
Neighbor’s breastworks, with the miners hot 
behind, and a hail of deadly missiles on their 
backs. One went down at the turn-table, and it 
did n’t look as if his life was worth a piece of waste. 
But the fellow, raising on one arm, began picking 
off the Polacks closest with a revolver. They scat- 
tered like turkeys, and he staggered across the table 


The Striker’s Story 1 27 

before they could damage him any worse. Half 
a dozen of us stood in the cupola of the fire-engine 
house, with the thing laid below like a panorama. 

Far as the blazing freight house lit the yards, we 
could see the rioters swarming in from the bottoms. 
The railroad officials gathered up stairs in the pas- 
senger depot waited helpless for the moment when 
the fury of the mob should turn on the unprotected 
building. The entire records of the division, the 
despatchers’ offices, the headquarters of the whole 
West End were under that roof, with nothing to 
stand between it and the torches. 

Awkwardly as the rioters had maneuvered, they 
seemed then to be getting into better shape for mis- 
chief. They were quicker at expedients, and two 
intensely active leaders rose out of the crowds. 
Following the shouts of the pair, which we could 
just hear, a great body of the strikers dashed up the 
yard. 

“ By the Gods ! ” cried Andy Cameron at my 
elbow, “ they ’re going for the oil-house ! ” 

Before the words were out we could hear the 


128 


Held for Orders 


dull stroke of the picks sinking into the cleated 
doors. Buckets were passed in and out from the 
house tanks. Jacketed cans of turpentine and var- 
nish were hustled down the line to men drunk with 
riot; in a moment twenty cars were ablaze. To 
top the frenzy they fired the oil-house itself. De- 
struction crazed the entire population of the 
bottoms. The burning cars threw the front of the 
big brick depot up into the sky. As the reflec- 
tion struck back from the plate-glass windows, the 
mob split into two great waves, and one headed 
for the passenger depot. They crossed the coal 
spurs brandishing torches and sledges and bars. 
We could see them plain as block signals. Every 
implement that ever figured in a yard showed in 
their line, but their leader, a youngish fellow, swung 
a long, tapering stake. As the foremost Polack 
climbed up on the last string of flats that separated 
them from the depot, the storage tanks in the oil- 
house took fire. The roof jumped from the wall- 
plates like one vast trap-door, and the liquid yellow 
spurted flaming a hundred feet up into the black. 


The Striker’s Story 129 

A splitting yell greeted the burst, and the Polacks, 
with added fury, raced towards the long depot. I 
made out then the man with the club. It was 
Rucker. 

The staff of the superintendent, and the force 
of despatchers, a handful of men all told, gathered 
at the upper windows and opened fire with revolvers. 
It was just enough to infuriate the rioters. And it 
appeared certain that the house would be burned 
under the defenders’ feet, for the broad platform 
was bare from end to end. Not a ghost of a bar- 
ricade, not a truck, not a shutter stood between 
the depot and the torch, and nobody thought of a 
man until Cameron with the quicker eyes cried : 

“ For God’s sake ! There ’s McTerza ! ” 

Such as pay-day there he was, walking down the 
platform towards the depot, and humping alongside 
— Sinkers. 

I guess everybody in both camps swore. Like 
a man in his sleep he was walking right in the teeth 
of the Polacks. If we had tried ourselves to pit 
him it could n’t have been done cleaner. His friends. 


9 


Held for Orders 


130 

for McTerza had them, must have shivered — but 
that was just McTerza ; to be where he should n’t, 
when he should n’t. Even had there not been more 
pressing matters, nobody could have figured out 
where the fellow had come from with his convoy, 
or where he was going. He was there ; that was 
all — he was there. 

The despatchers yelled at him from above. The 
cry echoed back short from a hundred Polack throats, 
and they sent a splitter ; it was plain they were mad 
for blood. Even that cfy did n’t greatly faze the 
fellow, but in the clatter of it all he caught another 
cry — a cry sent straight to McTerza’s ear, and 
he turned at the voice and the word like a man 
stung. Rucker, leaping ahead and brandishing the 
truck-stake at the hated stutterer, yelled, “ The 
scab ! ” 

The Reading engineer halted like a baited bear. 

Rucker’s cry was enough — in that time and at 
that place it was enough. McTerza froze to the 
platform. There was more — and we knew it, all 
of us — more between those two men than scab 


The Striker’s Story 1 3 1 

and brotherhood, strike and riot, flood or fire : there 
was a woman. We knew it so well there was 
hardly* a flutter anywhere, I take it, when men saw 
McTerza stooping, grasp Sinkers, shove him 
towards the depot, slip like a snake out of his pea- 
jacket, and turn to front the whole blooming mob. 
There wasn’t any fluttering, I take it — and not 
very much breathing ; only the scab, never a tre- 
mendous big man, swelled bigger in the eyes then 
straining his way than any man in McCloud has 
ever swelled before or since. 

Mobs are queer. A minute before it was the 
depot, now it was the scab — kill him. 

The scab stood. Rucker stumbled across a rail 
in his fury, and went sprawling, but the scab stood. 
The line wavered like tumbleweeds. They did n’t 
understand a man fronting forty. Then Ben 
Nicholson — I recognized his whiskers — began 
blazing at him with a pistol. Yet the scab stood 
and halted the Polack line. They hesitated, they 
stopped to yell; but the scab stood. 

‘-‘Stone him!” shouted Ben Nicholson. McTerza 


Held for Orders 


132 

backed warily across the platform. The Polacks 
wavered ; the instinct of danger unsettled them. 
Mobs are queer, A single man will head them 
quicker than a hundred guns. There is nothing so 
dangerous as one man. 

McTerza saw the inevitable, the steady circling 
that must get him at last, and as the missiles flew 
at him from a score of miners he crouched with 
the rage of a cornered rat, one eye always on 
Rucker. 

“Come in, you coyote!” yelled McTerza 
tauntingly. “ Come in ! ” he cried, catching up a 
coupling pin that struck him and hurling it wickedly 
at his nearest assailant. Rucker, swinging his 
club, ran straight at his enemy. 

“ Kill the scab I ” he cried and a dozen brist- 
ling savages, taking his lead, closed on the Read- 
ing man like a fan. From the windows above, 
the railroad men popped with their pistols ; they 
might as well have thrown fire-crackers. McTerza, 
with a cattish spring, leaped through a rain of brick- 
bats for Rucker. 



mm 


I - ' 


HIPV 

•L . .Jw 


IHk’ 




1 1 

. /; ^ . ^29 

HHm^' 

B[KnS\ 


4 



, 

>• % 


f* 


f 




*r 




€ 


'i^r 


> 


« 


t. 


V 

i 

•r.rrt' 

.f' 

I-? 

• ^ 

K. 




* 


t 


I ■ 




» 


I 


1 


# 


T 




« 



4 


/ 


I 


• * 


$ 



^ I 



The Striker’s Story 133 

The club in the striker’s hands came around 
with sweep enough to drop a steer. Quick as a 
sounder key McTerza’s head bobbed, and he went 
in and under on Rucker’s jaw with his left hand. 
The man’s head twisted with the terrific impact 
like a Chinese doll’s. Down he went, McTerza, 
hungry, at his throat ; and on top of McTerza the 
Polacks, with knives and hatchets and with Cossack 
barks, and they closed over him like water over a 
stone. 

Nobody ever looked to see him pull out, yet he 
wormed his way through them corkscrew fashion, 
while they hacked at one another, and sprang 
out behind his assailants with Rucker’s club. In 
his hands it cut through guards and arms and knives 
like toothpicks. Rucker was smothering under top- 
pling Polacks. But others ran in like rats. They 
fought McTerza from side to side of the platform. 
They charged him and flanked him — once they 
surrounded him — but his stanchion swung every 
way at once. Swarm as they would, they could 
not get a knife or a pick into him, and it looked as 


Held for Orders 


134 

if he would clear the whole platform, when his 
dancing eye caught a rioter at the baggage room 
door mercilessly clubbing poor little Sinkers. The 
boy lay in a pitiful heap no better than a dying 
mouse. McTerza, cutting his way through the 
circle about him, made a swath straight for the kid, 
and before the brute over him could run he brought 
the truck-stake with a full-arm sweep flat across 
his back. The man’s spine doubled like a jack- 
knife, and he sunk wriggling. McTerza made but 
the one pass at him ; he never got up again. Catch- 
ing Sinkers on his free arm, the Reading man ran 
along the depot front, pulling him at his side and 
pounding at the doors. But every door was barred, 
and none dared open. He was clean outside the 
breastworks, and as he trotted warily along, dragging 
the insensible boy, they cursed and chased and 
struck him like a hunted dog. 

At the upper end of the depot stands a huge ice- 
box. McTerza, dodging in the hail that followed 
him, wheeling to strike with a single arm when 
the savages closed too thick, reached the recess. 


The Striker’s Story 135 

and throwing Sinkers in behind, turned at bay on 
his enemies. 

With his clothes torn nearly ofF, his shirt stream- 
ing ribbons from his arms, daubed with dirt and 
blood, the scab held the recess like a giant, and 
beat down the Polacks till the platform looked a 
slaughter pen. While his club still swung, old 
John Boxer’s cannon boomed across the yard. 
Neighbor had run it out between his parallels, and 
turned it on the depot mob. It was the noise 
more than the execution that dismayed them. 
McTerza’s fight had shaken the leaders, and as 
the blacksmiths dragged their gun up again, shotted 
with nothing more than an Indian yell, McTerza’s 
assailants gave way. In that instant he disappeared 
through the narrow passage at his back, and under 
the shadow behind the depot made his way along 
the big building and up Main Street to the short 
order house. Almost unobserved he got to the 
side door, when Rucker’s crowd, with Rucker 
again on his feet, spied him dragging Sinkers inside. 
They made a yell and a dash, but McTerza got 


136 Held for Orders 

the boy in and the door barred before they could 
reach it. They ran to the front, baffled. The house 
was dark and the curtains drawn. Their clamor 
brought Mrs. Mullenix, half dead with fright, to 
the door. She recognized Nicholson and Rucker, 
and appealed to them. 

“ Pray God, do you want to mob me^ Ben Nich- 
olson ? ” she sobbed, putting her head out fearfully. 

‘‘We want the scab that sneaked into the side 
door, Mrs. Mary ! ” roared Ben Nicholson. “ Fire 
him out here.” 

“ Sure there ’s no one here you want.” 

“We know all about that,” cried Rucker break- 
ing in. “We want the scab.” He pushed her 
back and crowded into the door after her. 

The room was dark, but the fright was too great 
for Mrs. Mullenix, and she cried to McTerza to 
leave her house for the love of God. Some 
one tore down the curtains ; the glow of the 
burning yards lit the room, and out of the gloom, 
behind the lunch counter, almost at her elbow — a 
desperate sight, they told me — panting, blood- 


The Striker’s Story 137 

stained, and tprn, rose McTerza. His fingers 
closed over the grip of the bread-knife on the 
shelf beside him. 

‘‘ Who wants me ? ” he cried, leaning over his 
breastwork. 

“ Leave my house ! For the love of God, leave 
it ! ” screamed Mrs. Mullenix, wringing her hands. 
The scab, knife in hand, leaped across the counter. 
Nicholson and Rucker bumped into each other at 
the suddenness of it, but before McTerza could 
spring again there was a cry behind. 

‘‘ He sha’ n’t leave this house ! ” And Kate 
Mullenix, her face ablaze, strode forward. “He 
sha’ n’t leave this house ! ” she cried again, turn- 
ing on her mother. “ Leave this house, after 
he ’s just pulled your boy from under their cow- 
ardly clubs ! Leave it for who ? He sha’ n’t go 
out. Burn it over our heads ! ” she cried passion- 
ately, wheeling on the rioters. “ When he goes 
we’ll go with him. It’s you that want him, 
Curtis Rucker, is it ? Come, get him, you coward ! 
There he stands. Take him ! ” 


138 Held for Orders 

Her voice rang like a fire-bell. Rucker, burnt 
by her words, would have thrown himself on 
McTerza, but Nicholson held him back. There 
never would have been but one issue if they had 
met then. 

“ Come away ! ” called the older man hoarsely. 
“ It ’s not women we ’re after. She ’s an engineer’s 
wife. Curt j this is her shanty. Come away, I say,” 
and saying, he pushed Rucker and their coyote 
following out of the door ahead of him. Mrs. 
Mullenix and Kate sprang forward to lock the 
door. As they ran back, McTerza, spent with 
blood, dropped between them. So far as I can 
learn that is where the courtship began, right then 
and there — and as McTerza says, all along of 
Sinkers, for Sinkers was always Kate’s favorite 
brother, as he is now McTerza’s. 

Sinkers had a time pulling through after the 
clubbing. Polacks hit hard. There was no end 
of trouble before he came out of it, but sinkers are 
tough, and he pulled through, only to think more 
of McTerza than of the whole executive staff. 


The Striker’s Story 139 

At least that is the beginning of the courtship 
as I got it. There was never any more trouble 
about serving the new men at the short order house 
that I ever heard ; and after the rest of us got 
back to work we ate there side by side with 
them. McTerza got his coffee out of the hot 
tank, too, though he always insisted on paying 
twenty-five cents a cup for it, even after he mar- 
ried Kate and had a kind of an interest in the 
business. 

It was not until then that he made good his early 
threat. Sinkers being promoted for the toughness 
of his skull, thought he could hold up one end of 
the family himself, and McTerza expressed confi- 
dence in his ability to take care of the other ; so, 
finally, and through his persuasions, the short order 
house was closed forever. Its coffee to-day is like 
the McCloud riots, only a stirring memory. 

As for McTerza, it is queer, yet he never stut- 
tered after that night, not even at the marriage 
service ; he claims the impediment was scared clean 
out of him. But that night made the reputation 


140 Held for Orders 

of McTerza a classic among the good men of 
McCloud. McCloud has, in truth, many good 
men, though the head of the push is generally con- 
ceded to be the husband of royal Kate Mullenix — 
Johnnie McTerza. 


Held for Orders 


The Despatcher’s Story 

THE LAST ORDER 


« 


N >. • t r f . <t> . . ' ^. < ^.il^ 


The Despatcher’s Story 

THE LAST ORDER 

I N order to meet objection on the score of the 
impossible, and to anticipate inquiry as to 
whether “ The Despatcher’s Story ” is true, 
it may be well to state frankly at the outset that this 
tale, in its inexplicable psychological features, is a 
transcript from the queer things in the railroad life. 
It is based on an extraordinary happening that fell 
within the experience of the president of a large 
Western railway system. Whether the story, sug- 
gestive from any point of view of mystery, can be 
regarded as a demonstration of the efficacy of prayer 
may be a disputable question. In passing, how- 
ever, it is only fair to say that the circumstance on 


Held for Orders 


144 

which the tale is based was so regarded by the 
despatcher himself, and by those familiar with the 
circumstance. 

A HUNDRED times if once the thing had 
been, on appeals for betterment, before 
the board of directors. It was the one 
piece of track on the Mountain Division that train- 
men shook their heads over — the Peace River 
stretch. To run any sort of a line through that 
cafion would take the breath of an engineer. Give 
him all the money he could ask and it would stag- 
ger Wetmore himself. Brodie in his day said there 
was nothing worse in the Andes, and Brodie, before 
he drifted into the Rockies, had seen, first and last, 
pretty much all of the Chilian work. 

But our men had the job to do with one half the 
money they needed. The lines to run, the grades 
to figure, the culverts to put in, the fills to make, 
the blasting to do, the tunnel to bore, the bridge to 
build — in a limit 5 that was the curse of it — the 


The Despatcher’s Story 145 

limit. And they did the best they could. But 
I will be candid ; if a 'section and elevation of 
Rosamond’s bower and a section and elevation of 
our Peace River work were put up to stand for a 
prize at a civil engineers’ cake-walk the decision 
would go, and quick, to the Peace River track. 
There are only eight miles of it ; but our men 
would back it against any eighty on earth for whip- 
ping curves, tough grades, villainous approaches, 
and railroad tangle generally. 

The directors always have promised to improve 
it ; and they are promising yet. Thanks to what 
Hailey taught them, there’s a good bridge there 
now — pneumatic caissons sunk to the bed. It ’s 
the more pity they have n’t eliminated the dread 
main line curves that approach it, through a valley 
which I brief as a canon and the Mauvaises Terres 
rolled into one single proposition. 

Yet, we do lots of business along that stretch. 
Our engineers thread the cuts and are glad to get 
safely through them. Our roadmasters keep up the 
elevations, hoping some night the blooming right 


10 


146 Held for Orders 

of way will tumble into perdition. Our despatchers, 
studying under shaded lamps, think of it with their 
teeth clinched and hope there never will be any 
trouble on that stretch. Trouble is our portion 
and trouble we must get ; but not there. Let it 
comej but let it come anywhere except on the 
Peace. 

It was in the golden days of the battered old 
Wickiup that the story opens ; when Blackburn sat 
in the night chair. The days when the Old Guard 
were still there ; before Death and Fame and Cir- 
cumstance had stolen our first commanders and left 
only us little fellows, forgotten by every better fate, 
to tell their greater stories. 

Hailey had the bridges then, and Wetmore the 
locating, and Neighbor the roundhouses, and Bucks 
the superintendency, and Callahan, so he claimed, 
the work, and Blackburn had the night trick. 


The Despatcher's Story 147 


I 

W HEN Blackburn came from the plains 
he brought a record clean as the book 
of life. Four years on a station key ; 
then eight years at Omaha despatching, with never 
a blunder or a break to the eight years. But it was 
at Omaha that Blackburn lost the wife whose face 
he carried in his watch. I never heard the story, 
only some rumor of how young she was and how 
pretty, and how he buried her and the wee baby 
together. It was all Blackburn brought to the 
West End mountains, his record and the little face 
in the watch. They said he had no kith or kin on 
earth, besides the wife and the baby back on the 
bluffs of the Missouri ; and so he came on the 
night trick to us. 

I was just a boy around the Wickiup then, but 
I remember the crowd ; who could forget them ? 
They were jolly good fellows ; sometimes there 
were very high jinks. I don’t mean anybody drunk 


148 Held for Orders 

or that sort ; but good tobacco to smoke and good 
songs to sing and good stories to tell — and Lord ! 
how they could tell them. And when the pins 
slipped, as they would, and things went wrong, as 
they will, there were clear heads and pretty wits 
and stout hearts to put things right. 

Blackburn, as much as I can remember, always 
enjoyed it ; but in a different way. He had such 
times a manner like nobody else’s — a silent, beam- 
ing manner. When Bucks would roll a great white 
Pan-Handle yarn over his fresh linen shirt-front and 
down his cool clean white arms, one of them always 
bared to the elbow — sanding his points with the 
ash of a San Francisco cigar — and Neighbor would 
begin to heave from the middle up like a hippopota- 
mus, and Callahan would laugh his whiskers full 
of dew, and Hailey would yell with delight, and the 
slaves in the next room would double up on the 
dead at the story, Blackburn would sit with his 
laugh all in a smile, but never a noise or a word. 
He enjoyed it all ; not a doubt of that ; only it was 
all tempered, I reckon, by something that had gone 


The Despatcher’s Story 149 

before. At least, that ’s the way it now strikes me, 
and I watched those big fellows pretty close — the 
fellows who were to turn, while I was growing up 
among them, into managers and presidents and mag- 
nates; and some of them from every day catch-as- 
catch-can men with the common alkali flecking 
their boots into dead men for whom marble never 
rose white enough or high enough. 

Blackburn was four years at the Wickiup on the 
night trick ; it would n’t have seemed natural to 
see him there in daylight. It needed the yellow 
gloom of the old kerosene lamp in the room ; the 
specked, knotted, warped, smoky pine ceiling los- 
ing itself in black and cobwebbed corners; the 
smoldering murk of the soft-coal fire brooding in 
the shabby old salamander, and, outside in the dark- 
ness, the wind screwing down the gorge and rattling 
the shrunken casements, to raise Blackburn in the 
despatcher’s chair. Blackburn and the lamp and 
the stove and the ceiling and the gloom — in a word, 
Blackburn and the night trick — they went together. 

Before the Short line was opened the Number 


Held for Orders 


150 

One and Number Five trains caught practically all 
the coast passenger business. They were immensely 
heavy trains ; month after month we sent out two 
and three sections of them each way, and they always 
ran into our division on the night trick. Blackburn 
handled all that main line business with a mileage 
of eight hundred and five, besides the mountain 
branches, say four hundred more ; and the passen- 
ger connections came off them, mostly at night, for 
One and Five. 

Now, three men wrestle with Blackburn’s mile- 
age ; but that was before they found out that de- 
spatchers, although something tougher than steel, do 
wear out. Moreover, we were then a good way 
from civilization and extra men. If a despatcher 
took sick there was no handy way of filling in ; it 
was just double up and do the best you could. 

One lad in the office those days everybody 
loved : Fred Norman. He was off the Burling- 
ton. A kid of a fellow who looked more like 
a choir boy than a train despatcher. But he was 
all lightning — a laughing, restless, artless boy. 


The Despatcher’s Story 151 

open as a book and quick as a current. There was 
a better reason still, though, why they loved Fred : 
the boy had consumption j that ’s why he was out 
in the mountains, and his mother in Detroit used 
to write Bucks asking about him, and she used to 
send us all things in Fred’s box. His flesh was as 
white and as pink as mountain snow, and he had 
brown eyes; he was a good boy, and I called him 
handsome.’ I reckon they all did. Fred brought 
out a tennis set with him, the first we ever saw in 
Medicine Bend, and before he had been playing an 
hour he had Neighbor, big as a grizzly, and Calla- 
han, with a pipe in one hand and a tennis guide in 
the other, chasing all over the yard after balls; and 
Hailey trying to figure forty love, while Fred taught 
Bucks the Lawford drive. I don’t say what he was 
to me ; only that he taught me all I ever knew or 
ever will know about handling trains ; and, though 
I was carrying messages then, and he was signing 
orders, we were really like kids together. 

Fred for a long time had the early trick. He 
came on at four in the morning and caught most 


152 Held for Orders 

of the through freights that got away from the River 
behind the passenger trains. There was no use try- 
ing to move them in the night trick. Between the 
stock trains eastbound and the both-way passenger 
trains, if a westbound freight got caught in the moun- 
tains at night the engine might as well be standing 
in the house saving fuel — there was n’t time to get 
from one siding to another. So Fred Norman took 
the freights as they came and he handled them like 
a ringmaster. When Fred’s whip cracked, by Joe ! 
a train had to dance right along, grade or no grade. 
Fred gave them the rights and they had the rest to 
do — or business to do with the superintendent or 
with Doubleday, Neighbor’s assistant in the motive 
power. 

There was only one tendency in Fred Norman’s 
despatching that anybody could criticise : he never 
seemed, after handling trains on the plains, to ap- 
preciate what our mountain grades really meant, and 
when they pushed him he sent his trains out pretty 
close together. It never bothered him to handle a 
heavy traffic ; he would get the business through the 


The Despatcher’s Story 153 

mountains just as fast as they could put it at the' 
Division ; but occasionally there were some hair- 
curling experiences among the freights on Norman’s 
trick trying to keep off* each other’s coat-tails. One 
night in July there was a great press moving eight 
or nine trains of Montana grassers over the main 
line on some kind of a time contract — we were 
giving stockmen the earth then. Everybody was 
prodding the Mountain Division, and part of the 
stuff came in late on Blackburn and part of it early 
on Fred, who was almost coughing his head off about 
that time, getting up at 3.30 every morning. Fred 
at four o’clock took the steers ^nd sent them train 
after train through the Rat River country like bul- 
lets out of a Maxim gun. It was hot work, and 
before he had sat in an hour there was a stumble. 
The engineer of a big ten-wheeler pulling twenty- 
five cars of steers had been pushing hard and, at 
the entrance of the canon, set his air so quick he 
sprung one of the driver shoes and the main rod hit 
it. The great steel bar doubled up like a man with 
a cramp. It was showing daylight ; they made a 


Held for Orders 


154 

Stop, and, quick as men could do it, flagged both 
ways. But the last section was crowding into the 
canon right behind ; they were too close together, 
that was all there was to it. The hind section split 
into the standing train like a butcher knife into a 
sandwich. It made a mean wreck — and, worse, 
it made a lot of hard feeling at the Wickiup. 

When the investigation came it was pretty near 
up to Fred Norman right from the start, and he 
knew it. But Blackburn, who shielded him when 
he could, just as all the despatchers did, because he 
was a boy — and a sick one among men — tried to 
take part of the blame himself. He could afford it, 
Blackburn ; his shoulders were broad and he had n’t 
so much as a fly-speck on his book. Bucks looked 
pretty grave when the evidence was all in, and around 
the second floor they guessed that meant something 
for Norman. Fred himself could n’t sleep over it, 
and to complicate things the engineer of the stalled 
train, who hated Doubleday, hinted quietly that the 
trouble came in the first place from Doubleday’s 
new-fangled idea of putting the driver shoes behind 


The Despatcher’s Story 155 

instead of in front of the wheels. Then the fat 
was in the fire. Fred got hold of it, and, boy-like 
— sore over his own share in the trouble and exas- 
perated by something Doubleday was reported to 
have said about him over at the house — lighted into 
Doubleday about the engine failure. 

Doubleday was right in his device, as time has 
proved ; but it was unheard of then and more- 
over, the assistant master mechanic sensitive to 
criticism at any time, was a fearful man to run 
against. Sunday morning he and Norman met in 
the trainmaster’s ofiice. They went at each other 
like sparks, and when Doubleday, who had a hard 
mouth, began cursing Fred, the poor little de- 
spatcher, rankling with the trouble, anyway half 
sick, went all to pieces and flew at the big fellow 
like a sparrowhawk. He threw a wicked left into 
the master mechanic before Doubleday could lift a 
guard. But Walter Doubleday, angry as he was, 
could n’t strike Fred. He caught up both the 
boy’s hands and pushed him, struggling madly, 
back against the wall to slap his face, when a 


156 Held for Orders 

froth of blood stained Fred’s lips and he fell faint- 
ing; just at that minute Blackburn stepped into 
the room. 

It wasn’t the kind .of a time — they weren’t 
the kind of men — to ask or volunteer explana- 
tions. Blackburn was on Doubleday in a wink, 
and before Walter could right himself the night 
despatcher had thrown him headlong across the 
room. As the operators rushed in, Blackburn and 
the tall master mechanic sprang at each other in a 
silent fury. No man dare say where it might 
have ended had not Fred Norman staggered be- 
tween them with his hands up — but the blood 
was gushing from his mouth. 

It was pretty serious business. They caught 
him as he fell, and the boy lay on Blackburn’s arm 
limp as a dead wire : nobody thought after they 
saw that hemorrhage that he would ever live to 
have another. I was scared sick, and I never saw 
a man so cut up as Doubleday. Blackburn was 
cool in a second, for he saw quicker than others 
and he knew there was danger of the little de- 


The Despatcher’s Story 157 

spatcher’s dying right there in his tracks. Black- 
burn stood over him, as much at home facing death 
as he was in a fight or in a despatcher’s chair. 
He appeared to know just how to handle the boy 
to check the gush, and to know just where the 
salt was and how to feed it, and he had Double- 
day telephoning for Dr. Carhart and me running 
to a saloon after chopped ice in a jiffy. When 
anybody was knocked out, Blackburn was as regu- 
lar a nurse as ever you saw; even switchmen, when 
they got pinched, kind of looked to Blackburn. 

That day the minute he got Fred into Carhart’s 
hands there was Fred’s trick to take care of, and 
nobody, of course, but Blackburn to do it. He 
sat in and picked up the threads and held them till 
noon ; then Maxwell relieved him. Doubleday 
was waiting outside when Blackburn left the 
chair. I saw him put out his hand to the night 
despatches They spoke a minute, and went out 
and up Third Street toward Fred Norman’s room. 
It was a gloomy day around the depot. Every- 
body was talking about the trouble, and the way it 


158 Held for Orders 

had begun and the way it had ended. They 
talked in undertones, little groups in corners and 
in rooms with the doors shut. There was n’t 
much of that in our day there, and it was depress- 
ing. I went home early to bed, for I was on 
nights. But the wind sung so, even in the after- 
noon, that I couldn’t quiet down to sleep. 


II 

W E were handling trains then on the old 
single-order system. I mention this 
because in no other way could this 
particular thing have happened ; but there ’s no 
especial point in that, since other particular things 
do happen all the time, single order, double order, 
or no order system. 

The wind had dropped, and there was just a 
drizzle of rain falling through the mountains when 
I got down to the depot at seven o’clock that 
Sunday evening. I don’t know how much sleep 
Blackburn had had during the day, but he had 


The Despatcher’s Story 159 

been at Fred Norman’s bed most of the afternoon 
with Doubleday and Carhart, so he could n’t have 
had much. About half-past seven Maxwell sent 
me over there with a note and his storm-coat for 
him and the three men were in the room then. 
Boy-like, I hung around until it was time for 
Blackburn to take his trick, and then he and 
Doubleday and I walked over to the Wickiup 
together. 

At sundown everything was shipshape. There 
had n’t been an engine failure in the district for 
twenty-four hours and every hand-car was running 
smoothly. Moreover, there were no extra sec- 
tions marked up and only one Special on the 
Division card — a theatrical train eastbound with 
Henry Irving and company from ’Frisco to Chi- 
cago. The Irving Special was heavy, as it always 
is; that night there were five baggage cars, a 
coach and two sleepers. I am particular to lay all 
this out just as the night opened when Blackburn 
took his train sheet, because sometimes these 
things happen under extraordinary pressure on the 


i6o Held for Orders 

line and sometimes they don’t ; sometimes they 
happen under pressure on the despatcher himself. 
It was all fixed, too, for Blackburn to handle not 
only his own trick but the first two hours of Fred’s 
trick, which would carry till six o’clock in the 
morning. At six Maxwell was to double into a 
four-hour dog-watch, and Callahan was to sit in 
till noon. 

There was nothing to hold the big fellows 
around the depot that night, and they began strag- 
gling home through the rain about nine o’clock. 
Before ten, Bucks and Callahan had left the office ; 
by eleven. Neighbor had got away from the round- 
house ; Doubleday had gone back to sit with Fred 
Norman. 

The lights in the yard were low and the drizzle 
had eased into a mist; it was a nasty night, and 
yet one never promised better for quiet. Before 
midnight the switchmen were snug in the yard 
shanties ; in the Wickiup there were the night 
ticket agent downstairs and the night baggageman. 
Upstairs every door was locked and every room 


The Despatcher’s Story i6i 

was dark, except the despatcher’s office. In that, 
Blackburn sat at his key j nearby, but closer to the 
stove, sat the night caller for the train crews, try- 
ing to starch his hair with a ten-cent novel. 

The westbound Overland passenger. Number 
One, was due to leave Ames at 12.40 A. m.; 
and ordinarily would have met a Special like the 
Irving at Rosebud, which is a good bit west of 
the river. But Number One’s engine had been 
steaming badly all the way from McCloud, and 
on her schedule, which was crazy fast all night, 
she did not make Ames till some fifty minutes 
late. While there were no special orders, it 
was understood we were to help the Irving train 
as much as possible anyway. Bucks had made 
the acquaintance of the great man and his fellows 
on the westbound run, and as they had paid us 
the particular compliment of a return trip, we 
were minded to give them the best of it — even 
against Number One, which was always rather 
sacred on the sheet. This, I say, was pretty gen- 
erally understood j for when it was all over there 


II 


i 62 Held for Orders 

was no criticism whatever on Blackburn’s inten- 
tion of making a meeting-point for the two trains, 
as they then stood, at O ’Fallon’s siding. 

Between Ames and Rosebud, twenty miles 
apart, there are two sidings — O’Fallon’s, west of 
the river, and Salt Rocks, east. There was no 
operator at either place. The train that leaves 
Ames westbound is in the open for twenty miles 
with only schedule rights or a despatcher’s tissue 
between her and the worst of it. At one o’clock 
that morning Blackburn wired an order to Ames 
for Number One to hold at O’Fallon’s for Special 
202. A minute later he sent an order for Special 
202 to run to O’Fallon’s regardless of Number 
One. At least, he thought he sent such an 
order ; but he did n’t — he made a mistake. 

When he had fixed the meeting-point, Black- 
burn rose from his chair and sat down by the 
stove. I lazily watched him, till, falling into a 
doze as I eyed him drowsily, he began to loom 
up in his chair and to curl and twist toward the 
roof like a signal column ; then the front legs of 


The Despatcher’s Story 163 

his chair struck the floor, and with a start I woke, 
just as he stepped hurriedly back to his table and 
picked up the order book. 

The first suspicion I had that anything was wrong 
was an exclamation from Blackburn as he stared 
at the book. Putting it down almost at once and 
holding the page open with his left hand, he plugged 
Callahan’s house wire and began drumming his call. 
Callahan’s “Aye, aye,” came back inside of a min- 
ute, and Blackburn tapped right at him : “ Come 
down.” And I began to wonder what was up. 

There was an interval; then Callahan asked, 
“ What ’s the matter ? ” 

I got up and walked over to the water-tank 
for a drink. Blackburn again pressed the key, and 
repeated to Callahan precisely the words he had 
used before : “ Come down.” 

His face was drawn into the very shape of fear 
and his eyes, bent hard on me, were looking 
through me and through the shivering window — I 
know it now — and through the storming night, 
horror-set, into the canon of the Peace River. 


164 Held for Orders 

The sounder broke and he turned back, listened 
a moment ; but it was stray stuff about time 
freight. He pushed the chair from behind him, 
still like a man listening — listening; then with 
an effort, plain even to me, he walked across the 
office, pushed open the door of Callahan’s private 
room, and stood with his hand on the knob, look- 
ing back at the lamp. It was as if he still seemed 
to listen, for he stood undecided a moment ; then 
he stepped into the dark room and closed the 
door behind him, leaving me alone and dumb with 
fear. 

The mystery lay, I knew, in the order book. 
Curiosity gradually got the better of my fright, 
and I walked from the cooler over to the counter 
to get courage, and shoved the train register 
around noisily. I crossed to the despatchers’ table 
and made a pretence of arranging the pads and 
blanks. The train order book was lying open 
where he had left it under the lamp. With my 
eyes bulging, I read the last two orders copied 
in it : 


The Despatcher’s Story 165 

C. and E. No. One, Ames. 

No. One, Eng. 871, will hold at O’Fallon’s 
for Special 202. 

C. and E. Special 202, Rosebud. 

Special 202, Eng. 636, will run to Salt Rocks 
regardless of No. One. 

SALT ROCKS ! I glared at the words and 
the letters of the words. 

I re-read the first order and read again the sec- 
ond. OTallon’s for Number One. That was 
right. OTallon’s it should be for the Special 202, 
of course, to meet her. But it was n’t : it was 
the first station east of O’Fallon’s he had ordered 
the Special to run to. It was a lap order. My 
scalp began to creep. A lap order for the Irving 
Special and the Number One passenger, and it 
doomed them to meet head on somewhere between 
O’Fallon’s and the Salt Rocks, in the Peace River 
canon. 

My mouth went sticking dry. The sleet out- 
side had deepened into a hail that beat the west 
glass sharper and the window shook again in the 


t66 


Held for Orders 


wind. I asked myself, afraid to look around, 
what Blackburn could be doing in Callahan’s room. 
The horror of the wreck impending through his 
mistake began to grow on me ; I know what I 
suffered ; I ask myself now what he suffered, 
inside, alone, in the dark. 

Oh, you who lie down upon the rail at night to 
sleep, in a despatcher’s hand, think you, ever, in 
your darkened berths of the cruel responsibility on 
the man who in the watches of the night holds 
you in his keeping ? 

Others may blunder ; others may forget ; others 
may fall and stand again: not the despatcher ; a 
single mistake damns him. When he falls he 
falls forever. 

Young as I was, I realized that night the 
meaning of the career to which my little ambi- 
tion urged me. The soldier, the officer, the 
general, the statesman, the president, may make 
mistakes, do make mistakes, that cost a life or 
cost ten thousand lives. They redeem them and 
live honored. It is the obscure despatcher under 


The Despatcher’s Story 167 

the lamp who for a single lapse pays the penalty 
of eternal disgrace. I felt something of it even 
then, and from my boy’s heart, in the face of the 
error, in the face of the slaughter, I pitied Black- 
burn. 

Callahan’s room door opened again and Black- 
burn came out of the dark. I had left the table 
and was standing in front of the stove. He looked 
at me almost eagerly ; the expression of his face 
had completely changed. I never in my life saw 
such a change in so few minutes on any man’s 
face, and, like all the rest, it alarmed me. It was 
not for me to speak if I had been able, and he 
did not. He walked straight over to the table, 
closed the order book, plugged Callahan’s house 
wire again, and began calling him. The assistant 
superintendent answered, and Blackburn sent him 
just these words : 

“ You need not come down.” 

I heard Callahan reply with a question : “ What 
is the matter ? ” 

Blackburn stood calmly over the key, but he 


i68 


Held for Orders 


made no answer. Instead, he repeated only the 
words, “You need not come down.” 

Callahan, easily excitable always, was wrought up. 
“ Blackburn,” he asked over the wire, impatiently, 
“ What in God’s name is the matter ? ” But 
Blackburn only pulled the plug and cut him out, 
and sunk into the chair like a man wearied. 

“Mr. Blackburn,” I said, my heart thumping 
like an injector, “ Mr. Blackburn ? ” He glanced 
vacantly around ; seemed for the first time to see 
me. “ Is there anything,” I faltered, “ I can do ? ” 

Even if the words meant nothing, the offer 
must have touched him. “ No, Jack,” he an- 
swered quietly ; “ there is n’t.” With the words 
the hall door opened and Bucks, storm-beaten in 
his ulster, threw it wide and stood facing us both. 
The wind that swept in behind him blew out the 
lamps and left us in darkness. 

“Jack, will you light up?” 

It was Blackburn who spoke to me. But Bucks 
broke in instantly, speaking to him : 

“ Callahan called me over his house wire a few 


The Despatcher’s Story 169 

minutes ago, Blackburn, and told me to meet him 
here right away. Is anything wrong?” he asked, 
with anxiety restrained in his tone. 

I struck a match. I was so nervous that I took 
hold of the hot chimney > of the counter lamp 
and dropped it smash to the floor. No one said 
a word and that made me worse. I struck a 
second match, and a third, and with a fourth got 
the lamp on the despatchers’ table lighted as Black- 
burn answered the superintendent. “ Something 
serious has happened,” he replied to Bucks. “ I 
sent lap orders at one o’clock for Number One 
and the Irving Special.” 

Bucks stared at him. 

“ Instead of making a meeting-point at O’Fal- 
lon’s I sent One an order to run to O’Fallon’s and 
ordered the Special to run to Salt Rocks against 
One.” 

“ Why, my God ! ” exclaimed Bucks, that 
will bring them together in — the Peace canon — 
Blackburn ! — Blackburn ! — Blackburn !” he cried, 
tearing off his storm-coat. He walked to the table. 


Held for Orders 


170 

seized the order book and steadied himself with 
one hand on the chair j I never saw him like 
that. But it looked as if the horror long averted, 
the trouble in the Peace River canon, had come. 
The sleet tore at the old depot like a wolf, and 
with the sash shivering, Bucks turned like an exe- 
cutioner on his subordinate. 

“ What have you done to meet it ? ” He drew 
his watch, and his words came sharp as doom. 
“ Where ’s your wreckers ? Where ’s your relief.? 
What have you done ? What are you doing .? 
Nothing F Why don’t you speak ? Will you kill 
two trainloads of people without an effort to do 
anything ? ” 

His voice rang absolute terror to me ; I looked 
toward Blackburn perfectly helpless. 

“ Bucks, there will be no wreck,” he answered 
steadily. 

“ Be no wreck ! ” thundered Bucks, towering in 
the dingy room dark as the sweep of the wind. 
“ Be no wreck? Two passenger trains meet in 
hell and be no wreck ? Are you crazy ? ” 


The Despatcher’s Story 171 

The despatcher’s hands clutched at the table. 
‘‘No,” he persisted steadily, “I am not crazy, 
Bucks. Don’t make me so. I tell you there will 
not be a wreck.” 

Bucks, uncertain with amazement, stared at 
him again. 

“ Blackburn, if you ’re sane I don’t know what 
you mean. Don’t stand there like that. Do you 
know what you have done ? ” The superintend- 
ent advanced toward him as he spoke; there was 
a trace of pity in his words that seemed to open 
Blackburn’s pent heart more than all the bitter- 
ness. 

“ Bucks,” he struggled, putting out a hand toward 
his chief, “ I am sure of what I say. There will 
be no wreck. When I saw what I had done — 
knew it was too late to undo it — I begged God 
that my hands might not be stained with their 
blood.” Sweat oozed from the wretched man’s 
forehead. Every word wrung its bead of agony. 
“ I was answered,” he exclaimed with a strange 
confidence, “there will be no wreck. I cannot 


Held for Orders 


172 

see what will happen. I do not know what ; but 
there will be no wreck, believe me or not — it 
is so.” 

His steadfast manner staggered the superin- 
tendent. I could imagine what he was debating 
as he looked at Blackburn — wondering, maybe, 
whether the man’s mind was gone. Bucks was 
staggered; he looked it, and as he collected him- 
self to speak again the hall door opened like an 
uncanny thing, and we all started as Callahan burst 
in on us. 

“ What ’s so ? ” he echoed. ‘‘ What ’s up here ? 
What did it mean, Blackburn ? There ’s been 
trouble, has n’t there ? What ’s the matter with you 
all ? Bucks ? Is everybody struck dumb ? ” • 

Bucks spoke. “ There ’s a lap order out on 
One and the theatrical Special, Callahan. We 
don’t know what ’s happened,” said Bucks sullenly. 
“ Blackburn here has gone crazy — or he knows — 
somehow — there won’t be any wreck,” added the 
superintendent slowly and bewilderedly. “ It ’s 
between O’Fallon’s and Salt Rocks somewhere. 


The Despatcher’s Story 173 

Callahan, take the key,” he cried of a sudden. 
“ There ’s a call now. Despatcher ! Don’t speak ; 
ask no questions. Get that message,” he exclaimed 
sharply, pointing to the instrument. “ It may be 
news.” 

And it was news : news from Ames Station re- 
porting the Irving Special in at 1.52 a. m. — out 
at 1.54! We all heard it together, or it might 
not have been believed. The Irving Special, east- 
bound, safely past Number One, westbound, on a 
single track when their meeting orders had lapped ! 
Past without a word of danger or of accident, or 
even that they had seen Number One and stopped 
in time to avoid a collision ? Exactly ; not a word ; 
nothing. In at 52; out at 54. And the actors 
hard asleep in the berths — and on about its busi- 
ness the Irving Special — that ’s what we got from 
Ames. 

Callahan looked around. “ Gentlemen, what 
does this mean ? Somebody here is insane. I 
don’t know whether it’s me or you, Blackburn. 
Are you horsing me ? ” he exclaimed, raising his 


Held for Orders 


174 

voice angrily. “ If you are, I want to say I con- 
sider it a damned shabby joke.’" 

Bucks put up a hand and without a word of 
comment repeated Blackburn’s story just as the 
despatcher had told it. “ In any event there ’s 
nothing to do now ; it ’s on us or we ’re past it. 
Let us wait for Number One to report.” 

Callahan pored over the order book. “ May- 
be,” he asked after a while, “ did n’t you send the 
orders right and copy them wrong in the book, 
Blackburn ? ” 

The despatcher shook his head. “ They went 
as they stand. The orders lapped, Callahan. 
Wait till we hear from Number One. I feel 
sure she is safe. Wait.” 

Bucks was pacing the floor. Callahan stuck silent 
to the key, taking what little work came, for I saw 
neither of the chiefs wanted to trust Blackburn at 
the key. He sat, looking, for the most part, vacantly 
into the fire. Callahan meantime had the orders 
repeated back from Ames and Rosebud. It was 
#is Blackburn had said ; they did lap 5 they had been 


The Despatcher’s Story 175 

sent just as the order book showed. There was 
nothing for it but to wait for Rosebud to hear 
from Number One. When the night operator 
there called the despatcher again it brought Black- 
burn out of his gloom like a thunderclap. 

“ Give me the key ! ” he exclaimed. “ There 
is Rosebud.” Callahan pushed , back and Black- 
burn, dropping into the chair, took the message 
from the night operator at Rosebud. 

‘‘ Number One, in, 2.03 A. m.” 

Blackburn answered him, and strangely, with all 
the easy confidence of his ordinary sending. He 
sat and took and sent like one again master of the 
situation. 

“ Ask Engineer Sampson to come to the wire,” 
said he to Rosebud. Sampson, not Maje, but his 
brother Arnold, was pulling Number One that 
night. 

“ Engineer Sampson here,” came from Rosebud 
presently. 

“Ask Sampson where he met Special 202 
to-night.” 


176 Held for Orders 

We waited, wrought up, for in that reply must 
come the answer to all the mystery. There was 
a hitch at the other end of the wire j then Rosebud 
answered : 

“ Sampson says he will tell you all about it in 
the morning. 

‘‘ That will not do,’’ tapped the despatcher. 
“This is Blackburn. Superintendent Bucks and 
Callahan are here. They want the facts. Where 
did you meet Special 202 ? ” 

There was another wearing delay. When the 
answer came it was slowly, at the engineer’s 
dictation. 

“My orders were to hold at O’Fallon’s for 
Special 202,” clicked the sounder, repeating the 
engineer’s halting statement. “ When we cleared 
Salt Rocks siding and got down among the Quak- 
ers, I was cutting along pretty hard to make the 
canon when I saw, or thought I saw, a headlight 
flash between the buttes across the river. It 
startled me, for I knew the 202 Special could not 
be very far west of us. Anyway, I made a quick 


The Despatcher’s Story 177 

stop, and reversed and backed tight as I could make 
it for Salt Rocks siding. Before we had got a 
mile I saw the headlight again, and I knew the 202 
was against our order. We got into the clear just 
as the Special went by humming. Nobody but our 
train crew and my fireman knows anything about 


this.” 


The three men in front of me made no comment 


as they looked at each other. How was it possible 
for one train to have seen the headlight of another 
among the buttes of the Peace River country ? 

It was — possible. Just possible. But to figure 
once in how many times a vista would have opened 
for a single second so one engineer could see the 
light of another would stagger a multiplying machine. 
Chance ? Well, yes, perhaps. But there were no 
suggestions of that nature that night under the de- 
spatcher’s lamp at the Wickiup, with the storm driv- 
ing down the pass as it drove that night ; and yet 
at Peace River, where the clouds never rested, that 
night was clear. Blackburn, getting up, steadied 
himself on his feet. 



12 


178 Held for Orders 

“ Go in there and lie down,” said Callahan to 
him. “You ’re used up, old fellow, I can see that. 
I ’ll take the key. Don’t say a word.” 

“ Not a word, Blackburn,” put in Bucks, rest- 
ing his big hand on the despatcher’s shoulder. 
“ There ’s no harm done ; nobody knows it. Bury 
the thing right here to-night. You’re broke up. 
Go in there and lie down.” 

He took their hands; started to speak; but they 
pushed him into Callahan’s room ; they did n’t want 
to hear anything. 

All the night it stormed at the Wickiup. In 
the morning the Irving Special, flying toward Chi- 
cago, was far down the Platte. Number One was 
steaming west, deep in the heart of the Rockies; 
Blackburn lay in Callahan’s room. It was nine 
o’clock, and the sun was streaming through the 
east windows when Fred Norman opened the office 
door. Fred could do those things even when he 
was sickest. Have a hemorrhage one day, scare 
everybody to death, and go back to his trick the 
next. He asked right away for Kit, as he called 


The Despatcher’s Story 179 

Blackburn, and when they pointed to Callahan’s 
door Fred pushed it open and went in. A cry 
brought the operators to him. Blackburn was 

stretched on his knees half on the floor, half face 

4 

downward on the sofa. His head had fallen be- 
tween his arms, which were stretched above it. In 
his hands, clasped tight, they found his watch with 
the picture of his wife and his baby. Had he asked, 
when he first went into that room that night — when 
he wrestled like Jacob of old in his agony of prayer 
— that his life be taken if only their lives, the lives 
of those in his keeping, might be spared ? I do not 
know. They found him dead. 









Held for Orders 

v- 

The Nightman’s Story 

V- 


X 


BULLHEAD 




. . Aril/O 


( 


y; 




■%•>? 




i A>i 


The Nightman’s Story 

BULLHEAD 

H IS full name was James Gillespie Blaine 
Lyons ; but his real name was Bullhead 
— just plain Bullhead. 

When he began passenger braking the train- 
master put him on with Pat Francis. The very 
first trip he made, a man in the smoking car asked 
him where the drinking water was. Bullhead, 
though sufficiently gaudy in his new uniform, was 
not prepared for any question that might be thrown 
at him. He pulled out his book of rules, which 
he had been told to consult in case of doubt, and 
after some study referred his inquirer to the fire- 
bucket hanging at the front end of the car. The 


184 Held for Orders 

passenger happened to be a foreigner and very 
thirsty. He climbed up on the Baker heater, ac- 
cording to directions, and did at some risk get hold 
of the bucket — but it was empty. 

“ Iss no vater hier,” cried the second-class man. 
Bullhead sat half way back in the car, still study- 
ing the rules. He looked up surprised but turn- 
ing around pointed with confidence to the firepail 
at the hind end of the smoker. 

“Try the other bucket, Johnnie,’’ he said, 
calmly. At that every man in the car began to 
choke ; and the German, thinking the new brake- 
man was making funny of him, wanted to fight. 
Now Bullhead would rather fight than go to Sunday- 
school any day, and without parley he engaged the 
insulted homesteader. Pat Francis parted them 
after some hard words on his part ; and Kenyon, 
the trainmaster, gave Bullhead three months to 
study up where the water cooler was located in 
Standard, A pattern, smoking cars. Bullhead’s own 
mother, who did Callahan’s washing, refused to 
believe her son was so stupid as not to know ; but 


The Nightman’s Story 185 

Bullhead, who now tells the story himself, claims 
he did not know. 

When he got back to work he tried the freight 
trains. They put him on the Number Twenty- 
nine, local, and one day they were drifting into the 
yard at Goose River Junction when there came 
from the cab a sharp call for brakes. Instead of 
climbing out and grabbing a brakewheel for dear 
life. Bullhead looked out the window to see what 
the excitement was. By the time he had decided 
what rule covered the emergency his train had 
driven a stray flat half way through the eating 
house east of the depot. Kenyon, after hearing 
Bullhead’s own candid statement of fact, coughed 
apologetically and said three years ; whereupon 
Bullhead resigned permanently from the train 
service and applied for a job in the roundhouse. 

But the roundhouse — for a boy like Bullhead. 
It would hardly do. He was put at helpiftg Pete 
Beezer, the boiler washer. One night Pete was 
snatching his customary nap in the pit when the 
hose got away from Bullhead and struck his boss. 


Held for Orders 


1 86 

In the confusion, Peter, who was nearly drowned, 
lost a set of teeth ; that was sufficient in that de- 
partment of the motive power ; Bullhead moved 
on, suddenly. Neighbor thought he might do fora 
wiper. After the boy had learned something about 
wiping he tried one day to back an engine out on 
the turntable just to see whether it was easy. It 
was ; dead easy ; but the turntable happened to be 
arranged wrong for the experiment ; and Neighbor, 
before calling in the wrecking gang, took occasion 
to kick Bullhead out of the roundhouse bodily. 

Nevertheless, Bullhead, like every Medicine 
Bend boy, wanted to railroad. Some fellows can’t 
be shut off. He was offered the presidency of a 
Cincinnati bank by a private detective agency 
which had just sent up the active head of the 
institution for ten years; but as Bullhead could 
not arrange transportation east of the river he 
was obliged to let the opportunity pass. 

When the widow Lyons asked Callahan to put 
Jamie at telegraphing the assistant superintendent 
nearly fell off his chair. Mrs. Lyons, however. 


The Nightman’s Story 187 

was in earnest, as the red-haired man soon found 
by the way his shirts were starched. Her son, 
meantime, had gotten hold of a sounder, and was 
studying telegraphy, corresponding at the same 
time with the Cincinnati detective agency for the 
town and county rights to all “ hidden and undis- 
covered crime,” on the Mountain Division — rights 
offered at the very reasonable price of ten dollars 
by registered mail, bank draft or express money 
order ; currency at sender’s risk. The only obli- 
gations imposed by this deal were secrecy and a 
German silver star; and Bullhead, after holding 
his trusting mother up for the ten, became a regu- 
larly installed detective with proprietary rights to 
local misdeeds. Days he plied his sounder, and 
nights he lay awake trying to mix up Pete Beezer 
and Neighbor with the disappearance of various 
bunches of horses from the Bar M ranch. 

About the same time he became interested in 
dentistry ; not that there is any obvious connec- 
tion between railroading and detective work and 
filling teeth — but his thoughts just turned that 


i88 


Held for Orders 


way and following the advice of a local dentist, 
who did n’t want altogether to discourage him, 
Bullhead borrowed a pair of forceps and pulled all 
the teeth out of a circular saw to get his arm into 
practice. Before the dentist pronounced him pro- 
ficient, though, his mother had Callahan reduced to 
terms, and the assistant superintendent put Bull- 
head among the operators. 

That was a great day for Bullhead. He had to 
take the worst of it, of course ; sweeping the office 
and that ; but whatever his faults, the boy did as 
he was told. Only one vicious habit clung to him 
— he had a passion for reading the rules. In spite 
of this, however, he steadily mastered the taking, 
and, as for sending, he could do that before he got 
out of the cuspidor department. Everybody around 
the Wickiup bullied him, and maybe that was his 
salvation. He got used to expecting the worst of 
it, and nerved himself to take it, which in rail- 
roading is half the battle. 

A few months after he became competent to 
handle a key the nightman at Goose River Junction 


The Nightman’s Story 189 

went wrong. When Callahan told Bullhead he 
thought about giving him the job, the boy went wild 
with excitement, and in a burst of confidence 
showed Callahan his star. It was the best thing 
that ever happened, for the assistant head of the 
division had an impulsive way of swearing the 
nonsense out of a boy's head, and when Bullhead 
confessed to being a detective a fiery stream was 
poured on him. The foolishness couldn't quite 
all be driven out in one round ; but Jamie Lyons 
went to Goose River fairly well informed as to 
how much of a fool he was. 

Goose River Junction is not a lively place. It 
has been claimed that even the buzzards at Goose 
River Junction play solitaire. But apart from the 
utter loneliness it was hard to hold operators there 
on account of Nellie Cassidy. A man rarely 
stayed at Goose River past the second pay-check. 
When he got money enough to resign he resigned ; 
and all because Nellie Cassidy despised operators. 

The lunch counter that Matt Cassidy, Nellie's 
father, ran at the Junction was just an adjunct for 


Held for Orders 


190 

feeding train crews and the few miners who wan- 
dered down from the Glencoe spur. Matt himself 
took the night turn, but days it was Nellie who 
heated the Goose River coffee and dispensed the 
pie — contract pie made at Medicine Bend, and 
sent by local freight classified as ammunition, 
loaded and released, O. R. 

It was Nellie’s cruelty that made the frequent 
shifts at Goose River. Not that she was unim- 
pressible, or had no heroes. She had plenty of 
them in the engine and the train service. It was 
the smart-uniformed young conductors and the * 
kerchiefed juvenile engineers on the fast runs to 
whom Nellie paid deference, and for whom she 
served the preferred doughnuts. 

But this was nothing to Bullhead. He had his 
head so full of things when he took his new posi- 
tion that he failed to observe Nellie’s contempt. 
He was just passing out of the private detective 
stage ; just getting over dental beginnings ; just 
rising to the responsibility of the key, and a month 
devoted to his immediate work and the study of 


The Nightman’s Story 191 

the rules passed like a limited train.^ Previous to 
the coming of Bullhead, no Goose River man had 
tried study of the rules as a remedy for loneliness ; 
it proved a great scheme; but it aroused the un- 
measured contempt of Nellie Cassidy. She scorned 
Bullhead unspeakably, and her only uneasiness was 
that he seemed unconscious of it. 

However, the little Goose River girl had no 
idea of letting him escape that way. When scorn 
became clearly useless she tried cajolery — she 
smiled on Bullhead. Not till then did he give up ; 
her smile was his undoing. It was so absolutely 
novel to Bullhead — Bullhead, who had never got 
anything but kicks and curses and frowns. Before 
Nellie’s smiles, judiciously administered. Bullhead 
melted like the sugar she began to sprinkle in 
his coffee. That was what she wanted ; when 
he was fairly dissolved, Nellie like the coffee 
went gradually cold. Bullhead became miserable, 
and to her life at Goose River was once more 
endurable. 

It was then that Bullhead began to sit up all 


1 


192 Held for Orders 

day, after working all night, to get a single smile 
from the direction of the pie rack. He hung, 
utterly miserable, around the lunch room all day, 
while Nellie made impersonal remarks about the 
colorless life of a mere operator as compared with 
life in the cab of a ten-wheeler. She admired the 
engineer, Nellie — was there ever a doughnut girl 
who did n’t? And when One or Two rose smok- 
ing out of the alkali east or the alkali west, and the 
mogul engine checked its gray string of sleepers at 
the Junction platform, and Bat Mullen climbed 
down to oil ’round — as he always did — there 
were the liveliest kind of heels behind the counter. 

Such were the moments when Bullhead sat in 
the lunch room, unnoticed, somewhat back where 
the flies were bad, and helped himself aimlessly 
to the sizzling maple syrup — Nellie rustling back 
and forth for Engineer Mullen, who ran in for a 
quick cup, and consulted, after each swallow, a 
dazzling open-faced gold watch, thin as a double 
eagle; for Bat at twenty-one was pulling the fast 
trains and carried the best. And with Bullhead 


The Nightman's Story 193 

feeding on flannel cakes and despair, and Nellie 
Cassidy looking quite her smartest, Mullen would 
drink his coffee in an impassive rush, never even 
glancing Bullhead’s way — absolutely ignoring 
Bullhead. What was he but a nightman, anyway ? 
Then Mullen would take as much as a minute of 
his running time to walk forward to the engine 
with Miss Cassidy, and stand in the lee of the 
drivers chatting with her, while Bullhead went 
completely frantic. 

It was being ignored in that way, after her smiles 
had once been his, that crushed the night operator. 
It filled his head with schemes for obtaining recog- 
nition at all hazards. He began by quarrelling vio- 
lently with Nellie, and things were coming to a 
serious pass around the depot when the Klondike 
business struck the Mountain Division. It came 
with a rush and when they began running through 
freight extras by way of the Goose River short 
line, day and night, the Junction station caught the 
thick of it. It was something new altogether for 
the short line rails and the short line operators, and 


13 


Held for Orders 


194 

Bullhead’s night trick, with nothing to do but poke 
the fire and pop at coyotes, became straightway a 
busy and important post. The added work kept 
him jumping from sundown till dawn, and kept 
him from loafing daytimes around the lunch counter 
and ruining himself on fermented syrup. 

On a certain night, windier than all the Novem- 
ber nights that had gone before, the night operator 
sat alone in the office facing a resolve. Goose 
River had become intolerable. Medicine Bend was 
not to be thought of, for Bullhead now had a sus- 
picion, due to Callahan, that he was a good deal of 
a chump, and he wanted to get away from the 
ridicule that had always and everywhere made life 
a burden. There appeared to Bullhead nothing 
for it but the Klondike. On the table before the 
moody operator lay his letter of resignation, ad- 
dressed in due form to J. S. Bucks, superintendent. 
Near it, under the lamp, lay a well-thumbed copy 
of the book of rules, open at the chapter on Resig- 
nations, with subheads on — 

Resign, who should. 


The Nightman’s Story 195 

Resign, how to. 

Resign, when to. (See also Time.) 

The fact was it had at last painfully forced itself 
on Bullhead that he was not fitted for the railroad 
business. Pat Francis had unfeelingly told him so. 
Callahan had told him so ; Neighbor had told him 
so ; Bucks had told him so. On that point the lead- 
ing West End authorities were agreed. Yet in 
spite of these discouragements he had persisted and 
at last made a show. Who was it now that had 
shaken his stubborn conviction ? Bullhead hardly 
dared confess. But it was undoubtedly one who 
put up to be no authority whatever on Motive 
Power or Train Service or Operating — it was 
Matt Cassidy’s girl. 

While he reread his formal letter and compared 
on spelling with his pocket Webster, a train whis- 
tled. Bullhead looked at the clock: 11.40 p. m. 
It was the local freight. Thirty, coming in from the 
West, working back to Medicine. From the East, 
Number One had not arrived ; she was six hours 
late, and Bullhead looked out at his light, for he 


196 Held for Orders 

had orders for the freight. It was not often that 
such a thing happened, because One rarely went 
off schedule badly enough to throw her into his turn. 
He had his orders copied and O.K.’d, and waited 
only to deliver them. 

It was fearfully windy. The 266 engine, pull- 
ing Thirty that night, wheezed in the gale like a 
man with the apoplexy. She had a new fireman 
on, who was burning the life out of her, and as 
she puffed painfully down on the scrap rails of the 
first siding and took the Y, her overloaded safety 
gasped violently. 

When the conductor of the Number Thirty 
train opened the station door, the wind followed 
him like a catamount. The stove puffed open with 
a down draft, and shot the room full of stinging 
smoke. The lamp blaze flew up the chimney — 
out — and left the nightman and the conductor in 
darkness. The trainman with a swear shoved-to 
the door, and Bullhead, the patient, turned over his 
letter of resignation quick in the dark, felt for a 
match and relighted his lamp. Swearing again at 


The Nightman’s Story 197 

Bullhead, the freight conductor swaggered over to 
his table, felt in all the operator’s pockets for a 
cigar, tumbled all the papers around, and once 
more, on general principles, swore. 

Bullhead took things uncomplainingly, but he 
watched close, and was determined to fight if the 
brute discovered his letter of resignation. When 
the trainman could think of no further indignities 
he took his orders, to meet Number One at Sack- 
ley, the second station east of Goose River. After 
he had signed. Bullhead asked him about the depot 
fire at Bear Dance that had been going over the 
wires for two hours, reminded him of the slow 
order for the number nine culvert and as the rude 
visitor slammed the door behind him, held his 
hand over the lamp. Then he sat down again 
and turned over his letter of resignation. 

To make it binding it lacked only his signature 
— James Gillespie Blaine Lyons — now, himself, 
of the opinion of every one else on the West End : 
that he was just a natural born blooming fool. 
He lifted his pen to sign off the aspirations of a 


198 Held for Orders 

young lifetime when the sounder began to snap 
and sputter his call. It was the despatcher, and 
he asked hurriedly if Number Thirty was there. 

“ Number Thirty is on the Y,” answered Bull- 
head. 

Then came a train order. “ Hold Number 
Thirty till Number One arrives.” 

Bullhead repeated the order, and got back the 
O. K. He grabbed his hat and hurried out of 
the door to deliver the new order to the local 
freight before it should pull out. 

To reach the train Bullhead had to cross the 
short line tracks. The wind was scouring the 
flats, and as he tacked up the platform the dust 
swept dead into him. At the switch he sprang 
across the rails, thinking of nothing but reaching 
the engine cab of the local — forgetting about the 
track he was crossing. Before he could think or 
see or jump, a through freight on the short line, 
wild, from the West, storming down the grade be- 
hind him, struck Bullhead as a grizzly would a 
gnat — hurled him, doubling, fifty feet out on the 


The Nightman’s Story 199 

spur — and stormed on into the East without a 
quiver out of the ordinary. One fatality followed 
another. The engineer of the short line train did 
not see the man he had hit, and with the night- 
man lying unconscious in the ditch, the local 
freight pulled out for Sackley. 

Bullhead never knew just how long he lay 
under the stars. When his head began to whirl 
the wind was blowing cool and strong on him, 
and the alkali dust was eddying into his open 
mouth. It was only a matter of seconds, though 
it seemed hours, to pull himself together and to put 
up his hand unsteadily to feel what it was soaking 
warm and sticky into his hair; then to realize 
that he had been struck by a short line train ; 
to think of what a failure he had lately acknowl- 
edged himself to be ; and of what it was he was 
clutching so tightly in his right hand — the holding 
order for Number Thirty. He raised his reeling 
head ; there was a drift of starlight through 
the dust cloud, but no train in sight ; Number 
Thirty was gone. With that consciousness came 


200 Held for Orders 

a recollection — he had forgotten to put out his 
red light. 

His red light was n’t out. He kept repeating 
that to himself to put the picture of what it meant 
before him. He had started to deliver an order 
without putting out his light, and Number Thirty 
was gone ; against Number One — a head end col- 
lision staring the freight and the belated passenger 
in the face. Number Thirty, running hard on 
her order to make Sackley for the meeting, and 
One, running furiously, as she always ran — to- 
night worse than ever. 

He lifted his head, enraged with himself ; en- 
raged. He thought about the rules, and he grew 
enraged. Only himself he blamed, nobody else — 
studying the rules for a lifetime and just when it 
would mean the death of a trainload of people 
forgetting his red signal. He lifted his head; 
it was sick, deadly sick. But up it must come. 
Thirty gone, and it wabbled, swooning sick and 
groggy as he stared around and tried to locate him- 
self. One thing he could see, the faint outline of 


The Nightman’s Story 201 

the station and his lamp blazing smoky in the win- 
dow. Bullhead figured a second ; then he began 
to crawl. If he could reach the lamp before his 
head went off again, before he went completely 
silly, he might yet save himself and Number 
One. 

It was n’t in him to crawl till he thought of his 
own mistake; but there was a spur in the sweep 
of that through his head. His brain, he knew, 
was wabbling, but he could crawl ; and he stuck 
fainting to that one idea, and crawled for the light 
of his lamp. 

It is a bare hundred feet across to the.Y. Bull- 
head taped every foot of the hundred with blood. 
There was no one to call on for help ; he just 
stuck to the crawl, grinding his teeth in bitter self- 
reproach. They traced him, next morning when 
he was past the telling of it, and his struggle 
looked the track of a wounded bear. Dragging 
along one crushed leg and half crazed by the crack 
on his forehead. Bullhead climbed to the platform, 
across, and dragged himself to the door. He 


202 


Held for Orders 


can tell yet about rolling his broken leg under 
him and raising himself to grasp the thumb latch. 
Not until he tried to open it did he remember it 
was a spring lock and that he was outside. He 
felt in his pocket for his keys — but his keys 
were gone. 

There were no rules to consult then. No way 
on earth of getting into the office in time to do 
anything; to drag himself to the lunch room, 
twice further than the station, was out of the ques- 
tion. But there was a way to reach his key in 
spite of all bad things, and Bullhead knew the 
way. He struggled fast around to the window. 
Raising himself with a frightful twinge on one 
knee, he beat at the glass with his fist. Clutch- 
ing the sash, he drew himself up with a hand, 
and with the other tore away the muntin, stuck 
his head and shoulders through the opening, got 
his hand on the key, and called the first station 
east, Blaisdell, with the 19. Life and death that 
call meant; the 19, the despatcher’s call — hang- 
ing over the key, stammering the 19 over the wire. 


The Nightman’s Story 203 

and baptizing the call in his own blood — that is 
the way Bullhead learned to be a railroad man. 

For Blaisdell got him and his warning, and had 
Number One on the siding just as the freight 
tore around the west curve, headed for Sackley. 
While it was all going on. Bullhead lay on the 
wind-swept platform at Goose River with a hole 
in his head that would have killed anybody on the 
West End, or, for that matter on earth except 
James Gillespie Blaine Lyons. 

After Number Thirty had passed so impudently. 
Number One felt her way rather cautiously to 
Goose River, because the despatchers could n’t get 
the blamed station. They decided, of course, that 
Bullhead was asleep, and fixed everything at the 
Wickiup to send a new man up there on Three in 
the morning and fire him for good. 

But about one o’clock Number One rolled, bad- 
tempered, into Goose River Junction, and Bat 
Mullen, stopping his train, strode angrily to the 
station. It was dark as a pocket inside. Bat 
smashed in the door with his heel, and the train- 


Held for Orders 


204 

men swarmed in and began looking with their lan- 
terns for the nightman. The stove was red-hot, 
but he was not asleep in the arm-chair, nor nap- 
ping under the counter on the supplies. They 
turned to his table and discovered the broken win- 
dow, and thought of a hold-up. They saw where 
the nightman had spilled something that looked 
like ink over the table, over the order book, over 
the clip, and there was a hand print that looked 
inky on an open letter addressed to the superinten- 
dent — and a little pool of something like ink 
under the key. 

Somebody said suicide; but Bat Mullen sud- 
denly stuck his lamp out of the broken window, 
put his head through after it, and cried out. Set- 
ting his lantern down on the platform, he crawled 
through the broken sash and picked up Bullhead. 

Next morning it was all over the West End. 

“ And Bullhead ! ” cried everybody. “ That ’s 
what gets me. Who ’d have thought it of Bull- 
head 

When they all got up there and saw what Bull- 


The Nightman’s Story 205 

head had done, everybody agreed that nobody but 
Bullhead could have done it. 

The pilot bar of the short line mogul, in swip- 
ing Bullhead unmercifully, had really made a rail- 
road man of him. It had let a great light in on 
the situation. Whereas before every one else on 
the line had been to blame for his failures. Bull- 
head now saw that he himself had been to blame, 
and was man enough to stand up and say so. 
When the big fellows, Callahan and Kenyon and 
Pat Francis, saw his trail next morning, saw the 
blood smeared over the table, and saw Bullhead’s 
letter of resignation signed in his own blood man- 
ual, and heard his straight-out story days after- 
ward, they said never a word. 

But that morning, the morning after, Callahan 
picked up the letter and put it just as it was be- 
tween the leaves of the order book and locked both 
in his grip. It was some weeks before he had a 
talk with Bullhead, and he spoke then only a few 
words, because the nightman fainted before he got 
through. Callahan made him understand, though, 


2o6 


Held for Orders 


that as soon as he was able he could have any key 
on that division he wanted as long as he was run- 
ning it — and Callahan is running that division 
yet. 

It all came easy after he got well. Instead of 
getting the worst of it from everybody, Bullhead 
began to get the best of it, even from pretty Nellie 
Cassidy. But Nellie had missed her opening. 
She tried tenderness while the boy was being 
nursed at the Junction. Bullhead looked grim 
and far-off through his bulging bandages, and 
asked his mother to put the sugar in his coffee for 
him ; Bullhead was getting sense. 

Besides, what need has a young man with a 
heavy crescent-shaped scar on his forehead, that 
people inquire about and who within a year after 
the Goose River affair was made a train despatcher 
under Barnes T racy at Medicine Bend — what 
need has he of a coquette’s smiles? His mother, 
who has honorably retired from hard work, says half 
the girls at the Bend are after him, and his mother 
ought to know, for she keeps house for him. 


The Nightman’s Story 207 

Bullhead’s letter of resignation with the print of 
his hand on it hangs framed over Callahan’s desk, 
and is shown to railroad big fellows who are ac- 
corded the courtesies of the Wickiup. But when 
they ask Bullhead about it, he just laughs and says 
some railroad men have to have sense pounded into 
them. 


'I 





Held for Orders 

The Master Mechanic’s Story 

DELAROO 


14 






The Master Mechanic’s Story 

DELAROO 

Y OU TELL IT. I can’t tell it,” growled 
Neighbor. 

“ Oh, no. No. That ’s your story. 

Neighbor.” 

“ I ain’t no story-teller — ” 

“Just an able-jawed liar,” suggested Callahan 
through a benevolent bluish haze. 

“ Delaroo’s story was n’t any lie, though,” mut- 
tered Neighbor. “ But a fellow would think it was 
to hear it ; now he would, for a fact, would n’t 
he ? ” 


212 


Held for Orders 


I 

I F you want him, quick and short, it would 
be : whiskers, secret societies, statistics and 
plug tobacco — the latter mostly worked up. 
That was Maje Sampson. 

Bluntly, a wind-bag ; two hundred and seventy 
pounds of atmosphere. Up on benevolent frater- 
nities, up on politics, up on the money question, up 
on everything. The Seven Financial Conspiracies 
engaged Maje Sampson’s attention pretty contin- 
ually, and had for him a practical application : there 
were never less than seven conspiracies afoot in 
Medicine Bend to make Maje Sampson pay up. 

Pay ? Indeed, he did pay. He was always pay- 
ing. It was not a question of paying. Not at all. 
It was a question of paying up, which is different. 

The children — they were brickbats. Tow- 
headed, putty-faced, wash-eyed youngsters of all 
sizes and conditions. About Maje Sampson’s 
children there was but one distinguishing character- 


The Master Mechanic’s Story 213 

istic, they were all boys, nothing but boys, and they 
spread all over town. Was there a baby run over? 
It was Maje Sampson’s. Was there a child lost ? 
Maje Sampson’s. Was there a violently large- 
headed, coarse-featured, hangdog, clattering sort of 
a chap anywhere around ? In the street, station, 
roundhouse, yards, stock pens ? It was a brick- 
bat, sure, one of Maje Sampson’s brickbat boys. 

The Sampsons were at the end of the street, and 
the end of the street was up the mountain. Maje 
Sampson’s lot, “ raired,” as Neighbor put it — stood 
on its hind legs. His house had a startling tumble- 
over aspect as you approached it. The back end of 
his lot ran up into the sheer, but he marked the 
line sharply by a kind of horizontal fence, because 
the cliff just above belonged to the corporation that 
owned everything else on earth around Medicine 
Bend. 

Maje Sampson did not propose to let any grasp- 
ing corporation encroach on his lines, so he built, 
and added to from time to time, a cluster of things 
on the hind end of his lot — an eruption of small 


Held for Orders 


214 

buildings like pimples on a boy’s nose, running down 
in size from the barn to the last drygoods box the 
boys had heaved up the slope for a doghouse. To 
add to the variety, some one of the structures was 
always getting away in the wind, and if anything 
smaller than a hotel was seen careening across-lots 
in a Medicine Bend breeze it was spotted without 
further investigation as Maje Sampson’s. When 
the gale abated, Joe McBracken, who conducted 
the local dray line, was pretty sure to be seen with 
a henhouse or a woodshed, or something likewise, 
loaded on his trucks headed for Maje Sampson’s. 
Once the whole lean-to of the house blew off, but 
Joe McBracken stood ready for any emergency. 
He met the maverick addition at the foot of the 
grade, loaded it on his house-moving truck, hitched 
on four bronchos, crawled inside the structure, and, 
getting the lines through the front window, drove 
up Main Street before the wind had gone down. 
Joe was photographed in the act, and afterward used 
the exhibit in getting judgment against Maje Samp- 
son for his bill. 


The Master Mechanic’s Story 215 

Now a man like Maje would n’t be likely to have 
very much of a run nor very much of an engine. 
He had the 264 ; an old pop bottle with a stack 
like a tepee turned upside down. For a run he 
had always trains Number Twenty-nine and Thirty, 
the local freights, with an accommodation coach 
east of Anderson. There were times of stress fre- 
quently on the West End, times when everybody 
ran first in first out, except Maje Sampson j he 
always ran Twenty-nine and Thirty west to Silver 
River and back. A pettifogging, cheap, jerk-water 
run with no rights to speak of, not even against 
respectable hand-cars. The only things Maje 
Sampson did not have to dodge were tramps, 
blanket Indians and telegraph poles ; everything else 
side-tracked Twenty-nine and Thirty and Maje 
Sampson. Almost everybody on through trains 
must at some time have seen Maje Sampson 
puffing on a siding as Moore or Mullen shot by on 
Number One or Number Two. Maje was so big 
and his cab so little that when he got his head 
through the window you could n’t see very much of 


21 6 Held for Orders 

the cab for shoulders and whiskers and things. 
From the cab window he looked like a fourteen- 
year-old boy springing out of a ten-year-old jacket. 
Three things only, made Maje tolerable. First, 
the number of benevolent orders he belonged to ; 
second, Delaroo ; third, Martie. 

Maje Sampson was a joiner and a sitter up. He 
would join anything on the West End that had 
a ritual, a grip and a password, and he would sit up 
night after night with anybody that had a broken 
leg or a fever : and if nothing better offered, Maje, 
rather than go to bed, would tackle a man with the 
stomachache. This kind of took the cuss off ; but 
he was that peculiar he would sit up all night with 
a sick man and next day make everybody sick talking 
the money question — at least everybody but 
Delaroo. If Delaroo was bored he never showed 
it. As long as Maje would talk Delaroo would 
listen. That single word was in fact the key to 
Delaroo : Delaroo was a listener ; for that reason 
nobody knew much about him. 

He was n’t a railroad man by birth, but by 


The Master Mechanic’s Story 217 

adoption. Delaroo came from the mountains : he 
was just a plain mountain man. Some said his 
father was a trapper ; if so, it explained everything 
— the quiet, the head bent inquiringly forward, the 
modest unobtrusiveness of a man deaf. Of a size 
and shape nothing remarkable, Delaroo — but a 
great listener, for though he looked like a deaf 
man he heard like a despatcher, and saw mar- 
vellously from out the ends of his silent eyes. 
Delaroo for all the world was a trapper. 

He came into the service as a roundhouse 
sweeper ; then Neighbor, after a long time, put 
him at wiping. Delaroo said nothing but wiped 
for years and years, and was in a fair way to be- 
come liked, when, instead, he became one morning 
pitted with umbilical vesicles, and the doctors, with 
Delaroo’s brevity, said smallpox. The boarding 
house keeper threw him out bodily and at once. 
Having no better place to go, Delaroo wandered into 
Steve Boyer’s saloon, where he was generally wel- 
come. Steve, however, pointed a hospitable gun at 
him and suggested his getting away immediately 


2 1 8 Held for Orders 

from the front end of it. Delaroo went from there 
to the roundhouse with his umbilicals, and asked 
Neighbor what a man with the smallpox ought to 
do with it. Neighbor would n’t run, not even 
from the smallpox — but he told Delaroo what it 
meant to get the smallpox started in the round- 
house, and Delaroo wandered quietly away from 
the depot grounds, a pretty sick man then, stag- 
gered up the yards, and crawled stupid into a box 
car to die without embarrassing anybody. 

By some hook or crook, nobody to this day 
knows how, that car was switched on to Maje 
Sampson’s train when it was made up that day for 
the West. Maybe it was done as a trick to scare 
the wind-bag engineer. If so, the idea was suc- 
cessful. When the hind-end brakeman at the 
second stop came forward and reported a tramp 
with the smallpox in the empty box car, Maje was 
angry. But his curiosity gradually got the upper 
hand. This man might be, by some distant chance, 
he reflected, a P. Q. W. of A., or a frater, or a 
fellow, or a knight or something like — and when 


The Master Mechanic's Story 219 

they stopped again to throw ofF crackers and beer 
and catsup, Maje went back and entered the in- 
fected car like a lion-tamer to try lodge signals and 
things on him. Maje advanced and gave the coun- 
.tersign. It was not cordially received. He tried 
another and another — and another j his passes were 
lost in the air. The smallpox man appeared totally 
unable to come back at Maje with anything. He 
was not only delirious, but by this time so fright- 
fully broken out that Maje could n’t have touched 
a sound spot with a Masonic signal of distress. 
Finally the venturesome engineer walked closer into 
the dark corner where the sick man lay — and by 
Heaven ! it was the Indian wiper, Delaroo. 

When Maje Sampson got back into the cab he 
could not speak — at least not for publication. 
He was tearing mad and sputtered like a safety. 
He gathered up his cushion and a water bottle and 
a bottle that would explode if water touched it, 
and crawled with his plunder into the box car. 
He straightened Delaroo up and out and gave him 
a drink and by way of sanitary precaution took 


220 


Held for Orders 


one personally, for he himself had never had the 
smallpox — but once. When he had done this 
little for Delaroo he finished his run and came 
back to the Bend hauling his pest-house box car. 
The fireman quit the cab immediately after Maje 
exposed himself; the conductor communicated with 
him only by signals. The Anderson operator 
wired ahead that Maje Sampson was bringing back 
a man with smallpox on Thirty, and when Maje, 
bulging out of the 264 cab, pulled into the division 
,yard nobody would come within a mile of him. He 
set out the box car below the stock pens, cross- 
lots from his house up on the hill, and, not being 
able to get advice from anybody else, went home 
to consult Martie. 

Though there were a great many women in 
Medicine Bend, Maje Sampson looked to but one, 
Martie, the little washed-out woman up at Samp- 
son’s — wife, mother, nurse, cook, slave — Martie. 

No particular color hair; no particular color 
eyes; no particular color gown; no particular cut 
to it. A plain bit of a woman, mother of six boys, 


The Master Mechanic’s Story 221 

large and small, and wife of a great big wind-bag 
engineer, big as three of her by actual measure- 
ment. By the time Maje had taken counsel and 
walked down town prominent business men were 
fending off his approach with shotguns. The city 
marshal from behind a bomb-proof asked what he 
was going to do with his patient, and Maje re- 
torted he was going to take him home. He was n’t 
a M. R. W. of T. nor a P. S. G. of W. E,, but 
he was a roundhouse man, and between Maje and 
a railroad man, a wiper even, there was a bond 
stronger than grip or password or jolly business of 
any kind. The other things Maje, without real- 
izing it, merely played at ; but as to the railroad 
lay — if a railroad man was the right sort he could 
borrow anything the big fellow had, money, plug 
tobacco, pipe, water bottle, strong bottle, it made 
no odds what. And, on the other hand, Maje 
would n’t hesitate to borrow any or all of these 
things in return ; the railroad man who got ahead 
of Maje Sampson in this respect had claims to be 
considered a past grand in the business. 


222 


Held for Orders 


The doughty engineer lifted and dragged and 
hauled Delaroo home with him. If there was no 
hospital, Martie had said, no pest house, no nothing, 
just bring him home. They had all had the small- 
pox up at Sampson’s except the baby, and the 
doctor had said lately the baby appeared to need 
something. They had really everything up at 
Sampson’s sooner or later : measles, diphtheria, 
croup, everything on earth except money. And 
Martie Sampson, with the washing and mending 
and scrubbing and cooking, nursed the outcast 
wiper through his smallpox. The baby took it, of 
course, and Martie nursed the baby through and 
went on just the same as before — washing, mend- 
ing, cooking, scrubbing. Delaroo when he got 
well went to firing; Neighbor offered the job as a 
kind of consolation prize ; and he went to firing 
on the 264 for Maje Sampson. 

It was then that Maje took Delaroo fairly in 
hand and showed him the unspeakable folly of 
trying to get through the world without the com- 
radeship and benefits of the B. S. L.’s of U., and 


The Master Mechanic's Story 223 

the fraters of the order of the double-barrelled star 
of MacDufF. Delaroo caught a good deal of it on 
the sidings, where they lay most of their time dodg- 
ing first-class trains ; and evenings when they got 
in from their runs Delaroo, having nowhere else to 
go, used to wander, after supper, up to Sampson’s. 
At Sampson’s he would sit in the shade of the lamp 
and smoke while Maje, in his shirt-sleeves, held 
forth on the benevolent orders, and one boy crawled 
through the bowels of the organ and another 
pulled off the tablecloth — Delaroo always saving 
the lamp — and a third harassed the dog, and a 
fourth stuck pins in a fifth — and Martie, sitting 
on the dim side of the shade, so the operation 
would not appear too glaring, mended at Maje’s 
mammoth trousers. 

Delaroo would sit and listen to Maje and watch 
the heave of the organ with the boy, and the 
current of the tablecloth with the lamp, and the 
quarter in which the dog was chewing the baby, 
and watch Martie’s perpetual-motion fingers for a 
whole evening, and go back to the boarding-house 


Held for Orders 


224 

without passing a word with anybody on earth, he 
was that silent. 

In this way the big, bluffing engineer gradually 
worked Delaroo into all the secret benevolent 
orders in Medicine Bend — that meant pretty much 
every one on earth. There arose always, however, 
in connection with the initiations of Delaroo one 
hitch : he never seemed quite to know whom he 
wanted to leave his insurance money to. He could 
go the most complicated catechism without a hitch 
every time, for Maje spent weeks on the sidings 
drilling him, until it came to naming the beneficiary ; 
there he stuck. Nobody could get out of him to 
whom he wanted his money to go. 

Had he no relations back in the mountains ? 
Nobody up in the Spider country No wives or 
daughters or fathers or mothers or friends or any- 
thing ? Delaroo always shook his head. If they 
persisted he shook his head. Maje Sampson, sit- 
ting after supper, would ask, and Martie, when the 
dishes were side-tracked, would begin to sew and 
listen, and Delaroo, of course, would listen, but 


The Master Mechanic’s Story 225 

never by any chance would he answer ; not even 
when Maje tried to explain how it bore on 16 
to I. He declined to discuss any ratio or to 
name any beneficiary whatsoever. The right hon- 
orable recording secretaries fumed and denounced 
it as irregular, and Maje Sampson wore holes in his 
elbows gesticulating, but in the matter of distribut- 
ing his personal share of the unearned increment, 
Delaroo expressed no preference whatsoever. He 
paid his dues; he made his passes ; he sat in his 
place, what more could be required ? If they put him 
in a post of honor he filled it with a silent dignity. 
If they set him to guard the outer portal he guarded 
well ; it was perilous rather for a visiting frater or 
even a local brother to try getting past Delaroo 
if he was rusty in the ritual. Not Maje Sampson 
himself could work the outer guard without the 
countersign ; if he forgot it in the hurry of get- 
ting to lodge he had to cool his heels in the 
outer air till it came back ; Delaroo was pitiless. 

In the cab he was as taciturn as he was in the 
lodge or under the kerosene lamp at Sampson’s; he 

15 


226 


Held for Orders 


just listened. But his firing was above any man’s 
who ever stoked the 264. Delaroo made more 
steam on less coal than any man in the roundhouse. 
Neighbor began to hold him up as a model for the 
division, and the boys found that the way to jolly 
Neighbor was to say nice things about Delaroo. 
The head of the Motive Power would brighten 
out of a sulk at the mention of Delaroo’s name, 
and he finally fixed up a surprise ibr the Indian 
man. One night after Delaroo came in. Neighbor, 
in the bluff way he liked to use in promoting a 
man, told Delaroo he could have an engine; a 
good one, one of the K. class ; as much finer a 
machine than the old 264 as Duffy’s chronometer 
was than a prize package watch. Delaroo never 
said ay, yes, or no ; he merely listened. Neighbor 
never had a promotion received in just that way ; 
it nearly gave him the apoplexy. 

But if Delaroo treated the proposal coolly, not so 
Maje Sampson ; when the news of the offer reached 
him, Maje went into an unaccountable flutter. 
He acted at first exactly as if he wanted to hold 


The Master Mechanic’s Story 227 

his man back, which was dead against cab ethics. 
Finally he assented, but his cheeks went flabby and 
his eyes hollow, and he showed more worry than 
his creditors. Nobody understood it, yet there was 
evidently something on, and the Major’s anxiety 
increased until Delaroo, the Indian fireman and 
knight companion of the Ancient Order of Druids 
and Fluids, completely took Neighbor’s breath by 
declining the new engine. That was a West End 
wonder. He said if it made no odds he would stay 
on the 264. The men all wondered ; then some- 
thing new came up and the thing was forgotten. 
Maje Sampson’s cheeks filled out again, he regained 
his usual nerve, and swore on the money question 
harder than ever. 

After that it was pretty generally understood that 
Delaroo and Maje Sampson and the 264 were fix- 
tures. Neighbor never gave any one a chance to 
decline an engine more than once. The boys all 
knew, if Delaroo did n’t, that he would be firing a 
long time after throwing that chance by ; and 
he was. 


2 28 Held for Orders 

The combination came to be regarded as eternal. 
When the sloppy 264 hove in sight, little Delaroo 
and big Maje Sampson were known to be behind 
the boiler pounding up and down the mountains, 
up and down, year in and year out. Big engines 
came into the division and bigger. All the time 
the division was crowding on the Motive Power 
and putting in the mammoth types, until, when the 
264 was stalled alongside a consolidated, or a 
mogul skyscraper, she looked like an ancient beer 
glass set next an imported stein. 

With the 264, when the 800 or the iioo class 
were concerned, it was simply a case of keep out 
of our way or get smashed, Maje Sampson or no 
Maje Sampson, money question or no money ques- 
tion. Benevolent benefits fraternally proposed or 
ante-room signals confidentially put forth by the 
bald-headed 264* were of no sort of consequence 
with the modern giants that pulled a thousand tons 
in a string up a two-thousand-foot grade at better 
than twenty miles an hour. It was a clear yet 
cold, “ You old tub, get out of our way, will you ? ” 


The Master Mechanic's Story 229 
And the fast runners, like Moore and Hawksworth 
and Mullen and the Crowleys, Tim and Syme, had 
about as much consideration for Maje and his 
financial theories as their machines had for his 
machine. His jim-crow freight outfit did n’t cut 
much of a figure in their track schedules. 

So the Maje Sampson combination, but quite as 
brassy as though it had rights of the first class, 
dodged the big fellows up and down the line pretty 
successfully until the government began pushing 
troops into the Philippines, and there came days 
when a Rocky Mountain sheep could hardly have 
kept out of the way of the extras that tore, hissing 
and booming, over the mountains for ’Frisco. For 
a time the traffic came hot ; so hot we were 
pressed to handle it. There was a good bit of skir- 
mishing on the part of the passenger department to 
get the business, and then tremendous skirmishing 
in the operating department to deliver the goods. 
Every broken-down coach in the backyards was 
scrubbed up for the soldier trains. We aimed to 
kill just as few as possible of the boys en route to 


Held for Orders 


230 

the islands, though that may have been a mistaken 
mercy. However, we handled them well j not a 
man in khaki got away from us in a wreck, and in 
the height of the push we put more live stock into 
South Omaha, car for car, than has ever gone in 
before or since. 

It was November, and great weather for running, 
and when the rails were not springing under the sol- 
diers westbound, they were humming under the 
steers eastbound. Maje Sampson, with his beer 
kegs and his crackers and his 264 and his be- 
knighted fireman, hugged the sidings pretty close 
that week. Some of the trains had part of the 
rights and others had the remainder. The 264 and 
her train took what was left, which threw Maje 
Sampson most of the time on the worn-out, run- 
down, scrap rails that made corduroy roads of the 
passing tracks. Then came the night that Moul- 
ton, the Philippine commandant, went through on 
his special. With his staff and his baggage and his 
correspondents and that kind he took one whole 


The Master Mechanic’s Story 231 

train. Syme Crowley pulled them, with Ben Sherer, 
conductor, and whatever else may be said of that pair, 
they deliver their trains on time. Maje Sampson left 
Medicine Bend with Twenty-nine at noon on his 
regular run and tried to get west. But between the 
soldiers behind him and the steers against him, he 
soon lost every visionary right he ever did possess. 
They laid him out nearly every mile of the way to 
the end of the run. At Sugar Buttes they held him 
thirty minutes for the Moulton Special to pass, 
and, to crown his indignities, kept him there fifteen 
minutes more waiting for an eastbound sheep train. 
Sampson afterward claimed that Barnes Tracy, the 
despatcher that did it, was a Gold Democrat, but 
this never was proved. 

It was nearing dark when the crew of local freight 
Twenty-nine heard the dull roar of the Moulton 
Special speeding through the canon of the Rat. A 
passenger train running through the cafion at night 
comes through with the far roll of a thousand 
drums, deepening into a rumble of thunder. Then 
out and over all comes the threatening purr of the 


Held for Orders 


232 

Straining engine breaking into a storm of exhausts, 
until like a rocket the headlight bursts streaming 
from the black walls, and Moore on the 81 1, or 
Mullen with the 818, or Hawksworth in the mo, 
tear with a fury of alkali and a sweep of noise over 
the Butte switch, past caboose and flats and boxes 
and the 264 like fading light. Just a sweep of 
darkened glass and dead varnish, a whirl of smok- 
ing trucks beating madly at the fishplates, and the 
fast train is up, and out, and gone ! 

Twenty-nine, local, was used to all this. Used 
to the vanishing tail lights, the measured sinking 
of the sullen dust, the silence brooding again over 
the desert with, this night, fifteen minutes more to 
wait for the east-bound stock train before they dared 
open the switch. Maje Sampson killed the time by 
going back to the caboose to talk equities with the 
conductor. It was no trick for him to put away 
fifteen minutes discussing the rights of man with 
himself ; and with an angel of a fireman to watch 
the cab, why not ? The 264 standing on the 
siding was chewing her cud as sweet as an pld 


The Master Mechanic’s Story 233 

cow, with maybe a hundred and forty pounds of 
steam to the right of the dial, maybe a hundred and 
fifty — I say maybe, because no one but Delaroo 
ever knew — when the sheep train whistled. 

Sheep — nothing but sheep. Car after car after 
car, rattling down from the Short line behind two 
spanking big engines. They whistled, hoarse as 
pirates, for the Butte siding, and, rising the hill a 
mile west of it, bore down the grade throwing Dan- 
nah coal from both stacks like hydraulic gravel. 

No one knew or ever will know how it happened. 
They cat-hauled men on the carpet a week about 
that switch. The crew of the Moulton Special 
testified ; the crews of the stock train testified ; 
Maje Sampson testified ; his conductor and both 
brakemen testified ; the roadmaster and the section 
boss each testified, and their men testified — but 
however or whatever it was — whether the Moul- 
ton Special fractured the tongue, or whether the 
pony of the lead engine flew the guard, or whether 
the switch had been opened, or whether, in closing, 
the slip rail had somehow failed to follow the rod — 


Held for Orders 


234 

the double-headed Stocker went into that Butte 
switch, into that Butte siding, into the peaceable 
old 264 and the Twenty-nine, local, like a lyddite 
shell, crashing, rearing, ripping, scattering two whole 
trains into blood and scrap. Destruction, madness, 
throes, death, silence ; then a pyre of dirty smoke, 
a wail of sickening bleats, and a scream of hissing 
steam over a thousand sheep caught in the sudden 
shambles. 

There was frightened crawling out of the shat- 
tered cabooses, a hurrying up of the stunned crews, 
and a bewildering count of heads. Both engine 
crews of the stock train had jumped as their train 
split the switch. The train crews were badly 
shaken ; the head brakeman of the sheep train lay 
torn in the barbed-wire fencing the right of way ; 
but only one man was missing — the fireman of 
T wenty-nine — Delaroo. 

“ Second 86 jumped west switch passing track 
and went into train 29, engine 264. Bad spill. 
Delaroo, fireman the 264, missing,” wired Sugar 
Buttes to Medicine Bend a few minutes later. 


The Master Mechanic’s Story 235 

Neighbor got up there by ten o’clock with both 
roadmasters and the wrecking outfit. It was dark 
as a canon on the desert that night. Benedict 
Morgan’s men tore splintered car timber from the 
debris, and on the knolls back of the siding lighted 
heaping bonfires that threw a light all night on the 
dread pile smoking on the desert. They dug by 
the flame of the fires at the ghastly heap till mid- 
night ; then the moon rose, an extra crew arrived 
from the Bend, and they got the derrick at work. 
Yet with all the toil when day broke the confu- 
sion looked worse confounded. The main line 
was so hopelessly blocked that at daylight a special 
with ties and steel was run in to lay a temporary 
track around the wreck. 

“ What do I think of it ? ” muttered Neighbor, 
when the local operator asked him for a report for 
Callahan. “I think there’s two engines for the 
scrap in sight — and the 264, if we can ever find 
anything of her — and about a million sheep to pay 
for — ” Neighbor paused to give an order and 
survey the frightful scene. 


Held for Orders 


236 

“And Delaroo,” repeated the operator. “He 
wants to know about Delaroo — ” 

“ Missing.” 

At dawn hot coffee was passed among the 
wreckers, and shortly after sunrise the McCloud 
gang arrived with the second derrick. Then the 
men of the night took hold with a new grip to get 
into the heart of the pile; to find — if he was there 
— Delaroo. 

None of the McCloud gang knew the man they 
were hunting for, but the men from the Bend were 
soon telling them about Maje Sampson's Indian. 
Not a mute nod he ever gave; not a piece of to- 
bacco he ever passed; not a brief word he ever 
spoke to one of the battered old hulks who rode 
and cut and slashed and stormed and drank and 
cursed with Benedict Morgan, was forgotten then. 
Every slewed, twisted, weather-beaten, crippled-up, 
gin-shwered old wreck of a wrecker — they were 
hard men — had something to say about Delaroo. 
And with their hair matted and their faces streaked 
and their shirts daubed and their elbows in blood, 


The Master Mechanic’s Story 237 

they said it — whatever it was, much or little — of 
Delaroo. 

The picks swung, the derricks creaked, and all 
day with the heaving and the calling they toiled; 
but the sun was sinking before they got to the 
middle of it. Then Benedict Morgan, crawling 
under the drivers of the hind mogul, partly uncov- 
ered, edged out with a set face; he swore he 
heard breathing. It was alcohol to the veins of 
the double gang. Neighbor himself went in and 
heard — and stayed to fasten a grapple to pull the 
engine truck off the roof of a box car that was 
jammed over and against the mogul stack. 

The big derrick groaned as the slack drew and 
the truck crashed through a tier of stays and swung 
whirling into the clear. A giant wrecker dodged 
the suspended wheels and raising his axe bit a 
hole into the jammed roof. Through that they 
passed a second grapple, and presently it gave 
sullenly, toppled back with a crash, and the fore- 
most axman, peering into the opening, saw the 
heart of the wreck. Bending forward, he picked 


238 Held for Orders 

up something struggling in his arms. They thought 
it was a man ; but it was a sheep, alive and unin- 
jured, under all the horror : that was the breathing 
they heard. Benedict Morgan threw the man and 
his burden aside and stepped himself into the gap 
and through. One started to follow, but the chief 
of the wreckers waved him back. Close by where 
the sheep had been freed stood Delaroo. He stood 
as if with ear alert, so closely did the counterfeit 
seem the real. So sure was the impression of life 
that not until Morgan, speaking to the fireman, put 
his hand on his shoulder did he realize that the 
Indian stood quite dead just where the shock had 
caught him in his cab. 

Stumbling over the wreckage, they passed him 
in the silence of the sunset from hand to hand 
into the open. A big fellow, pallid and scared, 
tottered after them, and when they laid the dead 
man down, half fell at his side : it was Maje 
Sampson. 

It surprised everybody the way Maje Sampson 
went to pieces after Delaroo was killed. The 


The Master Mechanic’s Story 239 

Indian was carried back to the Bend and up 
to Sampson’s and laid out in the God-forsaken 
parlor ; but Maje was n’t any good fixing things up 
that time. He usually shone on like occasions. 
He was the comforter of the afflicted to an extra- 
ordinary degree; he gave the usual mourner no 
chance to let up. But now his day was as one 
that is darkened. When Neighbor went up next 
night to see about some minor matters connected 
with the funeral and the precedence of the various 
dozen orders that were to march, he found Maje 
Sampson and Maitie alone in the darkness of the 
parlor with the silent Delaroo. 

Maje turned to the master mechanic from where 
Delaroo lay. “ Neighbor, you might as well know 
it now as ary time. Don’t you say so, Martie ? 
Martie, what do you say ? ” Martie burst into 
tears ; but through them Neighbor caught the engi- 
neer’s broken confession. * “ Neighbor — I’m color 
blind.” The master mechanic sat stunned. 

‘‘True as God’s word. You might as well 
know it now. There ’s the man that stood between 


Held for Orders 


240 

me and the loss of my job. It ’s been coming on 
me for two year. He knew it, that ’s why he stayed 
in my cab. He stayed because I was color blind. 
He knowed I ’d git ketched the minute a new fire- 
man come in, Neighbor. He watched the signals 
— Delaroo. I ’m color blind, God help me.” 
Maje Sampson sat down by the coffin. Martie 
hushed her crying j the three sat in the darkness. 

‘‘ It would n’t worry me so much if it was n’t 
f’r the family. Neighbor. The woman — and the 
boys. I ain’t much a-savin’ ; you know that. If 
you can gi’ me a job I can get bread an’ butter 
out of, give it to me. I can’t pull a train ; my 
eyes went out with this man here. I wish to God 
it was me, and him standing over. A man that ’s 
color blind, and don’t know a thing on God’s earth 
but runnin’ an engine, is worse. ’n’ a dead man.’’ 

Neighbor went home thinking. 

They buried Delaroo. But even then they were 
not through with him. Delaroo had insurance in 
every order in the Bend, which meant almost every 
one on earth. There was no end to his benefit 


The Master Mechanic’s Story 241 

certificates, and no known beneficiaries. But when 
they overhauled his trunk they found every last 
certificate filed away up to the last paid assessment 
and the last quarter’s dues. Then came a shock. 
People found out there was a beneficiary. While 
the fraters were busy making their passes Delaroo 
had quietly been directing the right honorable 
recording secretaries to make the benefits run to 
Neighbor, and so every dollar of his insurance ran. 
Nobody was more thunderstruck at the discovery 
than the master mechanic himself. 

Yet Delaroo meant something by it. After 
Neighbor had studied over it nights the best of a 
month ; after Maje Sampson had tried to take the 
color test and failed, as he persistently said he 
would ; after he had gone to tinkering in the round- 
house, and from tinkering respectably, and by 
degrees down the hill to wiping at a dollar and forty 
cents a day with time and a half for overtime — 
Neighbor bethought himself all of a sudden one 
day of a paper Delaroo had once given him and 
askqd him to keep. 

16 


Held for Orders 


242 

He had put it away in the storekeeper’s safe with 
his own papers and the drawings of his extension 
front end patent — and safely forgotten all about it. 
It was the day they had to go into the county court 
about the will that was not, when he recollected 
Delaroo’s paper and pulled it out of its envelope. 
There was only a half sheet of paper, inside, with 
this wri^g from Delaroo to Neighbor: 

R. B. A. — What is coming to me on ensur- 
ance give to Marty Sampson, wife of Maje. Give 
my trunk to P. McGraw. 

Rispk., P. De la ROUX. 

When the master mechanic read that before the 
probate judge, Maje Sampson took a-trembling : 
Martie hid her face in her shawl, crying again. 
Maybe a glimmer of what it meant came for the 
first time in her life over her. Maybe she remem- 
bered Delaroo as he used to sit with them under 
the kerosene lamp while Maje untiringly pounded 
the money question into him — smoking as he lis- 
tened, and Martie mended on never-ending trousers. 


The Master Mechanic’s Story 243 

Looking from Maje Sampson, heated with mono- 
logue, to his wife, patiently stitching. No comments 5 
just looking as Pierre Delaroux could look. 

Strange, Neighbor thought it, and yet, maybe, 
not so strange. It was all there in the paper — 
the torn, worn little book of Delaroo’s life. She 
was the only woman on earth that had ever done 
him a kindness. 

Nobody at Medicine Bend quite understood it ; 
but nobody at Medicine Bend quite suspected that 
under all the barrenness up at Maje Sampson’s an 
ambition could have survived j yet one had. Martie 
had an ambition. Way down under her faded 
eyes and her faded dress there was an ambition, 
and that for the least promising subjects in the 
Rocky Mountains — the brickbats. Under the 
unending mending and the poverty and the toil,. 
Martie, who never put her nose out of doors, who 
never attended a church social, never ventured 
even to a free public school show — had an ambi- 
tion for the boys. She wanted the two biggest to 
go to the State University ; wanted them to go and 


Held for Orders 


244 

get an education. And they went ; and Maje 
Sampson says them boys, ary one, has forgotten 
more about the money question than he ever knew. 
It looks as if after all the brickbats might come 
out ; a bit of money in Martie’s hands goes so far. 

There are a few soldiers buried at the Bend. 
Decoration Day there is an attempt at a turn-out ; 
a little speeching and a little marching. A thin, 
straggle column of the same warped, bent old 
fellows in the same faded old blue. Up the hill 
they go and around to the cemetery to decorate. 

When they turn at Maje Sampson's place — 
there 's a gate there now — Martie and more or 
less of the boys, and Maje, kind of join in along 
and go over with them carrying a basket or so of 
flowers and a bucket of water. 

The boys soon stray over to where the crowd 
is, around the graves of the Heroes. But Martie 
gets down by a grave somewhat apart and prods 
the drifting gravel all up loose with an old case- 
knife. You would think she might be kneading 
bread there, the way she sways under her sun- 


The Master Mechanic’s Story 245 

bonnet and gloves — for her little boiled hands are 
in gloves now. 

“ I don’t know how much good it does Delaroo 
spiking up his grave once a year,” Neighbor always 
winds up. ‘‘ It may not do him a blamed bit of 
good, I don’t say it does. But I can see them. I 
see them from the roundhouse ; it does me good. 
Hm ? ” 

“ Maje ? ” he will add. “ Why, I ’ve got him 
over there at the house, wiping. I ’m going to 
put him running, the stationary if old John Boxer 
ever dies. When will he die ? Blamed if I know. 
John is a pretty good man yet. I can’t kill him, 
can I ? Well, then, what ’s a matter with you ? 

‘‘ No, Maje don’t talk as much as he used to ; 
forgetting his passes more or less, too. Getting 
old like some more of us. He ’s kind of quit 
the money question ; claims he don’t understand 
it now as well as the boys do. But he can talk 
about Delaroo; he understands Delaroo pretty well 


— now. 




Held for Orders 

The Operator’s Story 


DE MOLAY FOUR 

K 









s 


» 



I 





/ 


U 

‘•.I 

1 

4 


•t 

> 


0 









The Operator’s Story 

DE MOLAY FOUR 

V ERY able men have given their lives to 
the study of Monsoon’s headlight j yet 
science, after no end of investigation, 
stands in its presence baffled. 

The source of its illumination is believed to be 
understood. I say believed, because in a day when 
yesterday’s beliefs are to-morrow’s delusions I 
commit myself personally to no theory. Whether 
it is a thing living or dead ; whether malign to 
mackerel or potent in its influence on imperfectly 
understood atmospheric phenomena, I do not 
know. I doubt whether anybody knows, except 
maybe Monsoon himself. I know only that on 


Held for Orders 


250 

the West End, Monsoon’s headlight, from every 
point of view, stands high, and that on one occa- 
sion it stood between Abe Monsoon and a frightful 
catastrophe. 

There have been of late studied efforts to intro- 
duce electric headlights on the Mountain Division. 
But there are grizzled men in the cab who look 
with distrust — silent, it is true, yet distrust — on 
the claims put forth for them. While Monsoon’s 
headlight does its work — as it has done even long 
before Monsoon followed it to the West End, 
and will do long after he leaves the West End 
— why, they say, and reasonably enough, take on 
new and theoretical substitutes ? 

While the discussion deepens and even rages in 
the Wickiup, Monsoon himself is silent. Brave 
men are modest men. Among ourselves we don’t 
use adjectives ; where Monsoon is known it is not 
necessary to put anything ahead of his name — 
except, may be, once a month on the payroll when 
the cross-eyed accountant adds A. or Abe or Abra- 
ham, just as he happens to be fixed for time. Mon- 


The Operator's Story 251 
soon’s name in itself stands for a great deal. When 
his brother engineers, men who have grown seamy 
and weatherbeaten in the service, put up their 
voices for Monsoon’s headlight ; or when talka- 
tive storekeepers, who servilely jump at headquar- 
ters’ experiments in order to court the favor of 
the high, speak for electricity, Abe Monsoon him- 
self is silent. His light is there ; let them take it 
or leave it as they will. If the Superintendent of 
Motive Power should attempt to throw it out for 
the new-fangled arrangement. Monsoon would 
doubtless feel that it was not the first time Omaha 
had gone wrong — and, for that matter, that neither 
he nor anybody else had assurance it would be the 
last. However — 

The story opens on Bob DufFy. Bob, right from 
the start, was what I call a good-looker, and, being 
the oldest boy, he had more of the swing anyway. 
When Martin came along, his mother had n’t got 
over thinking about Bob. Doubtless she thought, 
too, of Martin ; but he was kind of overshadowed. 
Bob began by clerking in the post-office and de- 


Held for Orders 


252 

livering mail to all the pretty girls. His sympathy 
for the girls was so great that after a while he 
began passing out letters to them whether they 
were addressed to the girls or to somebody else. 
This gradually weakened his influence with the 
government. 

Martin began work in the telegraph office ; he 
really learned the whole thing right there at the 
Bend under Callahan. Began, carrying Western 
Unions stuck at his waist under a heavy leather 
belt. He wore in those days, when he had real 
responsibility, a formidable brown Stetson that ap- 
peared bent on swallowing his ears : it was about 
the time he was rising trousers and eleven. No- 
body but Sinkers ever beat Martin Duffy deliver- 
ing messages, and nobody, bar none — Bullhead, 
McTerza, anybody — ever beat him eating pie. 
It was by eating pie that he was able to wear the 
belt so long — and you may take that either way. 
But I speak gladly of the pie, because in the usual 
course of events there is n’t much pie in a de- 
spatcher’s life. There is, by very large odds, 


The Operator’s Story 253 

more anxiety than pie, and I introduce the pie, 
not to give weight to the incidents that follow 
but rather to lighten them ; though as Duffy has 
more recently admitted this was not always the 
effect of the pie itself. 

I do not believe that Martin Duffy ever had an 
enemy. A right tight little chap he was, with 
always a good word, even under no end of pressure 
on the single track. There’s many a struggling 
trainman that will look quick and grateful when 
any fellow far or near speaks a word about Martin 
Duffy. Fast as he climbed, his head never 
swelled. His hats rested, even after he got a key, 
same as the original Stetson, right on the wings of 
his ears. But his heart grew right along after his 
head stopped, and that ’s where he laid over some 
other railroad men I could mention if I had to, 
which I don’t — not here. 

About the time it looked as if Martin would 
make a go of it on the road, the post-office in- 
spectors were thinking Bob would make a go of 
it over the road. But he was such a kid of a 


Held for Orders 


254 

fellow that the postmaster cpnvinced the detec- 
tives Bob’s way of doing things was simple foolish- 
ness, which it probably was, and they merely swore 
him out of the service. 

It was then that Martin reached out a hand to 
his elder brother. There were really just the two 
brothers ; and back of them — as there is, some- 
where, back of every railroad man — a mother. 
No father — not generally; just a mother. A 
quiet, sombre little woman in a shawl and a bonnet 
of no special shape or size — just a shawl and a 
bonnet, that ’s all. Anyhow, the Duffy boys’ 
mother was that way, and there ’s a lot more 
like her. I don’t know what gets the fathers ; 
maybe, very often, the scrap. But there ’s almost 
always, somewhere, a mother. So after Martin 
began to make a record, to help his mother and 
his brother both, he spoke for Bob. Callahan 
did n’t hesitate or jolly him as he used to do 
with a good many. He thought the company 
could n’t have too many of the Duffy kind ; so 
he said, “Yes, sure.” And Bob Duffy was put 


The Operator’s Story 255 

at work — same thing exactly : carrying messages, 
reading hair-destroyers and blowing his salary on 
pie. 

But pie acts queer. Sometimes it makes a man’s 
head solid and his heart big; then again it makes 
a man’s head big and his heart solid. I ’m not 
saying anything more now except that pie cer- 
tainly acts different. 

Bob Duffy was taller than Martin and I would 
repeat, handsomer; but I can’t, because Martin 
had absolutely no basis of beauty to start with. 
He was parchment-like and palish from sitting 
night after night and liight after night over a 
sounder. Never sick a day in his life; but always 
over the sounder until, sleeping or waking, resting 
or working, the current purred and purred through 
his great little head like a familiarity taking old 
tomcat. He could guess more off a wire than most 
men could catch after the whole thing had tumbled 
in. 

So up and up ladder he went. Messenger, ope- 
rator — up to assistant despatcher, up to a regular 


256 Held for Orders 

trick despatcher. Up to the .orders and signing the 
J. M. C., the letters that stood for our superin- 
tendent’s name and honor. Up to the trains and 
their movements, up to the lives, then CHIEF ! — 
with the honor of the division all clutched in Martin 
Duffy’s three quick right fingers on the key and his 
three quick left fingers on the pen at the same in- 
stant scratching orders across the clip. Talk about 
ambidexterity — Martin did n’t know what it would 
be like to use one hand at a time. If Martin Duffy 
said right, trains went right. If he said wrong, 
trains went wrong. But Martin never said the 
wrong; he said only the right. Giddings knows; 
he copied for him long enough. Giddings and 
plenty more of them can tell all about Martin 
Duffy. 

Bob did n’t rise in the service quite so fast as 
Martin. He was rather for having a good time. 
He did more of the social act, and that pleased his 
mother, who, on account of her bonnet-and-shawl 
complexion, did n’t achieve much that way. Mar- 
tin, too, was proud of his brother, and as soon as 


The Operator’s Story 257 

Bob could handle a wire, which was very soon 
(for he learned things in no time) Martin got 
Callahan to put him up at Grant as operator. 
Bob got the place because he was Martin’s 
brother, nothing else. He held it about two 
months, then he resigned and went to San ’Frisco. 
He was a restless fellow ; it was Bob up and Bob 
down. For a year he wandered around out there, 
telegraphing, then he bobbed up again in Medicine 
Bend out of a job. He wanted to go to work, and 

— well, Callahan — Martin’s brother, you know 

— sent him up to Montair as night operator. 
Three months he worked steady as a clock. Then 
one night the despatchers at the Bend could n’t get 
Montair for two hours. It laid out Number Six 
and a Special with the General Manager and made 
no end of a row. 

Martin said right ofF he ought to go. But there 
was the little mother up home, silent, I expect, but 
pleading-like. It was left largely to Martin, for 
the young fellow was already chief; and that was 
the trouble — he hated to bear down too hard ; so 


17 


258 Held for Orders 

he compromised by asking his superintendent not 
to fire Bob but to set him back. They sent him 
up as night man to Rat River, the meanest place 
on the whole system. That was the summer of 
the Templars’ Conclave at San ’Frisco. 

We worked the whole spring getting things up 
along the line, from Omaha to the Sierras, for that 
Conclave. Engines were overhauled, rolling stock 
touched up, roadbed put in shape, everything shaken 
from end to end. Not only were the passenger 
records to be smashed, but beyond that a lot of our 
big general officers were way-up Masons and meant 
that our line should get not merely the cream of 
the business but the cream of the advertising out 
of the thing. The general tenor of the instruc- 
tions was to nickel-plate everything, from the 
catalpas to the target rods. For three months be- 
fore the Conclave date we were busy getting ready 
for it, and when the big day drew near on which 
we were to undertake the moving and the feeding of 
six thousand people one way on one track through 
the mountains, the cartinks smoked cross-cut 


The Operator’s Story 259 

and the Russian sectionmen began to oil their 
hair. 

Callahan was superintendent under Bucks, then 
General Manager, and Martin DufFy, Chief De- 
spat cher. Neighbor, Superintendent of Motive Power, 
and Doubleday, Division Master Mechanic, and 
with everything buttoned up on the West End we 
went that Sunday morning on the firing line to take 
the first of the Templar Specials. 

Medicine Bend had the alkali pretty well washed 
out of its eyes, and never before in its history had 
it appeared really gay. The old Wickiup was deco- 
rated till it looked like a buck rigged for a ghost 
dance. Right after daybreak the trains began roll- 
ing in on Harold Davis’s trick. DufFy had annulled 
all local freights and all through odds and evens, all 
stock tramps east and all westbound empties — 
everything that could be, had been suspended for 
that Sunday; and': with it all there were still by five 
times more trains than ever before rolled through 
Medicine Bend in twenty-four hours. 

It was like a festival day in the mountains. Even 


26 o 


Held for Orders 


the Indians and the squavv^ men turned out to 
see the fun. There was a crowd at the depot by 
five o’clock, when the first train rolled up the lower 
gorge with St. John’s Commandery, Number Three 
from Buffalo ; and the Pullmans were gay with 
bunting. The Medicine Bend crowd gave them 
an Indian yell and in two minutes the Knights, 
with their scalps in their hands as a token of sur- 
render, were tumbling out of their sleepers into the 
crisp dawn. They were just like schoolboys, and 
when Shorty Lovelace — the local curiosity who 
had both feet and both hands frozen off the night 
he got drunk with Matt Cassidy at Goose River 
Junction — struck up on his mouth-organ “ Put 
Me Off at Buffalo,” they dropped seven dollars, 
odd, and three baggage checks into his hat while 
the crews were changing engines. It appeared to 
affect them uncommon, to see a fellow without 
any hands or feet play the mouth-organ and be- 
fore sun-down Shorty made the killing of his life. 
With what he raked in that day he kept the city 
marshal guessing for three months — which was 


The Operator’s Story 261 

also pretty good for a man without any hands or 
feet. 

All day it was that way : train after train and 
ovation after ovation. The day was cool as a 
watermelon — August — and bright as a baby’s 
face all through the mountains; and the Templars 
went up into the high passes with all the swing and 
noise we could raise. Harold Davis took it all 
morning steady from 4 a. m. at the despatcher’s 
key. He was used up long before noon ; but he 
stayed, and just at twelve o’clock, while a big 
Templar train from Baltimore was loading its com- 
mandery in front of the Wickiup after an early 
dinner, and a big Templar band played a tingling 
two-step, Martin DulFy stuck his dry, parchment 
^ face into the platform crowd, elbowed his way 
unnoticed through it, climbed the Wickiup stairs, 
walked into the despatcher’s room, and, throwing 
off his hat and coat, leaned over Harold Davis’s 
shoulder and took a transfer. 

Young Giddings had been sitting there in a per- 
spiration half an hour then ; he copied for Martin 


262 


Held for Orders 


DufFy that day. At noon they figured to get the 
last Templar over the Eagle Pass with the set of 
the sun. When Duffy took the key he never 
looked his force cleaner, only he was tired ; Gid- 
dings could see. that. The regular man had been 
sick a week and Martin had been filling in. Be- 
sides that, all Saturday, the day before, he had been 
spiking the line — figuring what could be annulled 
and what could n’t ; what could be run extra and 
what could be put into regulars. Callahan had 
just got married and was going out to the Coast 
on his wedding tour in Bucks’s car. He had re- 
fused to look at an order after Saturday night. 
Sunday morning, and from Sunday morning on, 
it was all against Duffy. When the Chief took 
the middle trick there were fourteen Templar Spe- 
cials still to come with the last one just pulling out 
of McCloud on the plains. They were ordered 
to run with right of track over all eastbound trains 
thirty minutes apart all the way through. 

A minute after Martin Duffy sat in, the con- 
ductor of the train below registered out. There 


The Operator’s Story 263 

was a yell pretty soon, and away went the Balti- 
more crowd — and they were corkers, too, those 
Baltimore fellows, and travelled like lords. 

At five o’clock in the evening the trains in the 
West Division were moving just like clocks on 
the hour and the half — thirty minutes, thirty min- 
utes, thirty minutes — and, as far as young Giddings 
could see, Duffy, after five booming hours, was 
fresher than when he took the chair. The little 
despatcher’s capacity for work was something enor- 
mous 5 it was n’t till after supper-time, with the 
worst of the figuring behind him, and in the letting 
down of the anxiety, that Martin began to look 
older and his dry Indian hair began to crawl over 
his forehead. By that time his eyes had lost their 
snap, and when he motioned Giddings to the key, 
and got up to walk up and down the hall in the 
breeze, he looked like a wilted potato vine. His 
last batch of orders was only a little one compared 
with those that had gone before. But with the 
changes to the different crews they read about like 
this — 


264 Held for Orders 

Telegraphic Train Order Number 68. Moun- 
tain Division. 

Superintendent’s Office, August 8, 1892. 

For Medicine Bend to C. and E. of Engines 664, 
738, 810, 326, and 826. 

Engines 664, 738, 810, and 326 will run as four 
Specials, Medicine Bend to Bear Dance. Engine 
826 will double-head Special 326 to summit of 
Eagle Pass. 

First No. 80, Engine 179, will run two hours 
thirty minutes late Bear Dance to Medicine Bend. 

Second No. 80, Engine 264, will run three hours 
and fifteen minutes late Bear Dance to Medicine 
Bend. 

Third No. 80, Engine 210, will run four hours 
and thirty minutes late Bear Dance to Medicine 
Bend. 

J. M. C. 
D. 

When young Giddings sat in, the sun was drop- 
ping between the Tetons. In the yard the car- 
cleaners were polishing the plates on Bucks’s private 
car and the darky cook was pulling chickens out of 
the refrigerator. Dufty had thirteen Conclaves 


The Operator’s Story 265 

moving smoothly on the middle trick. The final 
one was due, and the hostlers were steaming down 
with the double-header to pull it over the Pass. 
This, the last of the Commandery trains, was to 
bring DE MOLAY COMMANDERY NUM- 
BER FOUR of Pittsburg, and the orders were to 
couple Bucks’s car on to it for the run west. De 
Molay — and everybody had notice — was Bucks’s 
old commandery back in Pennsylvania, and he was 
going to the end of the division that night with the 
cronies of his youth. Little fellows they were in 
railroading when he rode the goat with them, but 
now mostly, like him, big fellows. Half a dozen 
old salts had been pounding ahead at him all day 
over the wire. They were to join him and Mr. 
and Mrs. Callahan for sapper in the private car, 
and the yellow cider lay on the thin-shaven ice and 
the mountain grouse curled on the grill irons 
when De Molay Four, Pittsburg, pulled into Medi- 
cine Bend. 

We had seen a good many swell trains that day, 
the swellest that ever pounded our fishplates. Pull- 


266 Held for Orders 

mans solid, and the finest kind of people. Boston, 
Washington, New York, Philadelphia sent some 
pretty gorgeous trains. But with at least half the 
town on the platform, when De Molay Four rolled 
in it took their breath so they could n’t yell till the 
Sir Knights began pouring from the vestibules and 
gave Medicine Bend their own lordly cheer. 

Mahogany vestibules they were and extension 
platforms ; salon lamps and nickeled handrails ; 
buffet smoker and private diner : a royal train and 
a royal company ; olive green from tender to tail 
lights — De Molay Four, Pittsburg. 

Bucks’s old gang spied him. Modestly back 
under the portico, he stood near the ticket window, 
and they broke through at him solid. They pulled 
him and hauled him and mauled him and passed him 
from hand to hand. They stood him on his head 
and on his hands and on his feet again, and told 
him of something they wanted and wanted right 
off. 

Bucks looked the least bit uncertain as he con- 
sidered the opening request. It was n’t much in 


The Operator's Story 267 

some ways, what they asked ; in other ways it was 
a good deal. He laughed and bantered and joked 
them as long as they would stand it; then he 
called up to Martin DufFy, who was leaning out 
the despatchers’ window, “We’ll see how he 
talks,” laughed Bucks in his great big way. “ But, 
boys, it ’s up to the Chief. I ’m not in it on the 
orders, you know. Martin,” he called, as Duffy 
bent his head, “ they want fifteen minutes here to 
stretch their legs. Say they’ve been roasted in 
the alkali all day. Can you do anything for the 
boys ? ” 

The boys ! Big fellows in fezes, Shriner style, 
and slim fellows in duck, sailor style, and bow- 
legged fellows in cheviot, any old style. Chaps in 
white flannel, and chaps in gray, and chaps in blue. 
Turkish whiskers and Key West cigars and Cru- 
saders’ togs — and, between them, Bucks, his head 
most of the time in chancery. It was the first 
time they had seen him since he had made our 
Jim Crow line into a system known from the 
Boston and Maine to the Mexican Central, and, 


268 Held for Orders 

bar none, run cleaner or better. The first time 
they had seen him since he had made a name for 
himself and for his road from Newport News to 
’Frisco, and they meant now to kill him, dead. 

You know about what it meant and about how 
it went, how it had to go. What could Martin 
say to the man who had made him all he was and 
who stood, now a boy again among the boys of 
his boyhood, and asked for fifteen minutes — a 
quarter of an hour for De Molay Number Four? 
It threw the little Chief completely off his sched- 
ules ; just fifteen minutes was more than enough 
to do that. All the work was done, the anxiety 
nearly past — Martin had risen to rest his thump- 
ing head. But fifteen minutes ; once in a lifetime 
— Bucks asking it. 

Duffy turned to big Jack Moore standing at his 
side ready to pull De Molay over the Pass, and 
spoke him low. Jack nodded ; everything went 
with Jack, even the turn-tables that stuck with 
other engineers. Martin in his shirt-sleeves leaned 
out the window and, looking down on the tur- 


The Operator’s Story 269 

baned and turbulent mob, spoke so Bucks could 
hear. 

“ What is it ? ” demanded the most puissant 
commander of De Molay excitedly. ‘‘ What does 
he say, Bucks ? ” 

‘‘ What says the slave ? ” growled a second for- 
midable crusader j ‘‘ out with it ! ” 

“ All we want is fifteen minutes.’’ 

“ You would n’t turn us down on fifteen minutes 
this far from an oasis, would you, Bucks ? ” pro- 
tested a glass-eyed Shriner. 

Bucks looked around royally. “ Fifteen min- 
utes ? ” he drawled. “What’s a quarter of an 
hour in a lifetime, Jackman, on the last oasis ? 
Take ofF your clothes, you fellows, and take half an 
hour. Now will you be good ? ” 

De Molay put up a Templar yell. They always 
get the good things of life, those Pittsburg men ; 
things other fellows could n’t begin to get. They 
passed the word through the sleepers, and the 
women began pouring from the vestibules. In 
two quick minutes out came the Duquesne band 


Held for Orders 


270 

in red pompons, duck trousers and military jackets, 
white corded with black. The crowd broke, the 
band marched down the platform and, striking up 
the “Washington Post,” opened ranks on the grass 
plot above the Wickiup to receive the De Molay 
guard. One hundred Knights Templar in fatigue 
debouched into a bit of a park, and in the purple 
of the sunset gave a commandery drill to the honor 
of Bucks — Bucks and the West End. 

It was Sunday night, and still as August could 
make it. The battalion moving silent and mobile 
as a streamer over the grass, marched, deployed 
and rested. They broke, to the clear-cut music, 
into crosses and squares and crescents and stars 
until small boys went cross-eyed, and wheeling at 
last on the line, they saluted Bucks — himself a 
past grand commander — and the railroad men 
yelled. 

Meantime the General Manager’s private car 
had been pasted on the tail-end of De Molay Four, 
and a pusher edging up, stuck its nose into the rear 
vestibule. On the head end Jack Moore and 


The Operator’s Story 271 

Oyster were backing down on the olive-green 
string with the two smoothest moguls on the divi- 
sion. Bucks and Neighbor had held back every- 
thing good all day for De Molay Four, down to 
engines and runners and conductor. Pat Francis 
carried the punch, and the little Chief sat again in 
the despatcher’s chair for De Molay Four. 

And while the lovely women strolled in the cool 
of the evening and the odor of mountain sweetness, 
and the guard drilled, and the band played, the 
Chief knit his brows over his train sheet. It looked 
now, re-arranged, re-ordered, readjusted and re- 
organized, as if a Gila Monster had crawled over it 
without wiping his feet. And when De Molay Four 
got ready to pull out, with Moore and Oyster on 
the throttles and old John Parker in the baggage, 
where he had absolutely nothing to do but drink 
cigars and smoke champagne and Pat Francis in 
the aisles, and Bucks, with Mr. and Mrs. Callahan 
and their crowd, in private Number Twelve — 
there was that much shouting and tooting and 
waving th^t Martin Duffy simply could n’t think 


Held for Orders 


272 

for a few seconds ; yet he held them all, for life or 
for death, every last one, in the curve of his 
fingers. 

So they stood ready in the gorge while Duffy 
studied wearily how to handle First, Second, and 
Third Eighty against them. 

First, Second, and Third Eighty ! If they could 
only have been wiped off the face of the rails a^ 
easy as they might have been wiped off a train 
sheet ! But there they were, three sections, and 
big ones, of the California fast freight. High- 
class stuff for Chicago and New York that 
could n’t be held or laid out that Sunday, not for a 
dozen Conclaves. All day First, Second, and 
Third Eighty had been feeling their way east 
through the mountains, trying to dodge the swell 
commanderies rolling by impudent as pay cars. 
But all the final plans to keep them out of every- 
body’s way, out of the way of fez and turban and 
chapeau and Greek cross and crimson-splashed 
sleepers, were now dashed by thirty minutes at 
Medicine for De Molay Four. 


The Operator’s Story 273 

Order after order went from under his hand. 
New meeting-points for First, Second, and Third 
Eighty and De Molay Four, otherwise Special 326. 

Pat Francis snatched the tissues from Duffy’s 
hand and, after the battalion had dispersed among 
their wives and sisters, and among the sisters 
of the other fellow ; after the pomponed chaps 
hkd chucked the trombones and cymbals and drums 
at old John Parker’s shins; after the last air- 
cock had been tested and the last laggard cru- 
sader thrown forcibly aboard by the provost guard, 
the double-header tooted, “ Out ! ” and, with the 
flutter of an ocean liner, De Molay Four pulled up 
the gorge. 

The orders buttoned in the reefers gave De Molay 
a free sweep to Elcho, and Jack Moore and Oyster 
were the men to take it, good and hard. More- 
over, there was glory aboard. Pennsylvania nobs, 
way-up railroad men, waiting to see what for mo- 
tive power we had in the Woolly West; how we 
climbed mountains and skirted canon walls, and 
crawled down two and three per cent grades. Then 

i8 


Held for Orders 


274 

with Bucks himself in the private car — what won- 
der they let her out and swung De Molay through 
the gorge as maybe you Ve seen a particularly 
buoyant kite snake its tale out of the grass and 
drag it careening skyward. When they slowed 
for Elcho at nightfall, past First and Second Eighty, 
and Bucks named the mileage, the Pennsys refused 
to believe it for the hour’s run. But fast as they 
had sped along the iron trail, Martin Duffy’s work 
had sped ahead of them, and this order was waiting : 

Telegraphic Train Order Number 79. 

C. and E. Third No. 80, Rat River. 

C. and E. Special 326, Elcho. 

Third No. 80, Engine 210, and Special 326 will 
meet at Rock Point. 

J. M. C. 
D. 

With this meeting-point made, it would be 
pretty much over in the despatchers’ office. Mar- 
tin Duffy pushed his sallow hair back for the last 
time, and, leaving young Giddings to get the last 
O. K.’s and the last Complete on his trick, got 
out of the chair. 


The Operator’s Story 275 

It had been a tremendous day for Giddings, a 
tremendous day. Thirty-two Specials on the 
despatchers, and Giddings copying for the Chief. 
He sat down after DulFy, filled with a riotous im- 
portance because it was now, in effect, all up to 
Giddings, personally ; at least until Barnes Tracy 
should presently kick him out of the seat of honor 
for the night trick. Mr. Giddings sat down and 
waited for the signature of the orders. 

Very soon Pat Francis dropped off De Molay 
Four, slowing at Elcho, ran straight to the operator 
for his order, signed it and at once Order 79 
was throbbing back to young Giddings at Medicine 
Bend. It was precisely 7.54 p. m. when Gid- 
dings gave back the Complete and at 7.55 Elcho 
reported Special 326, “ out,” all just like clockwork. 
What a head Martin Duffy has, thought young 
Giddings — and behold ! all the complicated ever- 
lasting headwork of the trick and the day, and of 
the West End and its honor, was now up to the 
signature of Third Eighty at Rat River. Just 
Third Eighty's signature for the Rock Point meet- 


2 j 6 Held for Orders. 

ing, and the biggest job ever tackled by a single- 
track road in America (Giddings thought) was 
done and well done. 

So the ambitious Giddings by means of a pocket- 
mirror inspected a threatening pimple on the end 
of his chubby nose palming the glass skilfully so 
Barnes Tracy couldn’t see it even if he did inter- 
rupt his eruption, and waited for Bob DufFy, the Rat 
River nightman, to come back at him with Third 
Eighty’s signature. Under Giddings’ eye, as he 
sat, ticked Martin Duffy’s chronometer — the watch 
that split the seconds and chimed the quarters and 
stopped and started so impossibly and ran to a sec- 
ond a month — the watch that Bucks (who never 
did things by halves) had given little Martin DufFy 
with the order that made him Chief. It lay at 
Giddings’s fingers, and the minute hand wiped from 
the enamelled dial seven o’clock fifty-five, fifty-six, 
seven, eight — nine. Young Giddings turned to his 
order book and inspected his entries like a method- 
ical bookkeeper, and Martin Duffy’s chronometer 
chimed the fourth quarter, eight o’clock. One 


The Operator’s Story 277 

entry he had still to make. Book in hand he 
called Rat River. 

“ Get Third Eighty’s signature to Order 79 and 
hurry them out,” he tapped impatiently at Bob 
Duffy. 

There was a wait. Giddings lighted his pipe 
the way Callahan always lighted his pipe — 
putting out his lips to catch all the perfume and 
blowing the first cloud away wearily, as Callahan 
always did wearily. Then he twirled the match 
meditatively, and listened, and got suddenly this 
from Bob Duffy at Rat River : 

“ I forgot Order 79,” came Bob Duffy’s mes- 
sage. “ I let Third Eighty go without it. They 
left here at seven — fifty ” — fifty something, Gid- 
dings never heard fifty what. The match went 
into the ink, the pipe into the water-pail, and Gid- 
dings, before Bob Duffy finished, like a drowning 
man was calling Elcho with the life and death, the 
Nineteen call. 

“Hold Special 326 ! ” he cried over the wire the 
instant Elcho replied. 


278 Held for Orders 

But Elcho, steadily, answered this : 

‘‘ Special — Three-twenty-six — left — here — 
seven-fifty-five/’ 

Giddings, with both hands on the table, raised 
up like a drunken man. The West End was 
against it. Third Eighty in the open and going 
against the De Molay Four. Bucks, Callahan, wife 
— everybody — and Rock Point a blind siding that 
no word from anybody on earth could reach ahead 
of Third Eighty. 

Giddings sprang to the open window and shouted 
to anybody and everybody to call Martin Duffy. 
But Martin Duffy spoke behind him. 

♦ “ What do you want ? ” he asked ; it came ter- 
ribly quick on Giddings as he turned. 

“ What ’s the matter ? ” exclaimed Martin, look- 
ing into the boy’s face. “ Speak, can’t you ? 
What ’s the matter, Giddings ? ” 

“ Bob forgot Order 79 and let Third Eighty go 
without it — and Special 326 is out of Elcho,” 
choked Giddings. 


The Operator’s Story 279 

“ Bob at — Rat RiVer — gave Third Eighty a 
clearance without the Order 79.” 

Martin Duffy sprang straight up in the air. 
Once he shut his lifted hands ; once he looked at 
Giddings, staggering again through the frightful 
news, then he dropped into the chair, looked wildly 
around, seized his key like a hunted man, stared at 
his train sheet, grabbed the order book, and listened 
to Giddings cutting off one hope after another of 
stopping Special 326. His fingers set mechani- 
cally and he made the Rat River call ; but Rat River 
was silent. With Barnes Tracy tiptoeing in be- 
hind on the instinct of trouble, and young Gid- 
dings shaking like a leaf, the Chief called Rat 
River. Then he called Elcho, asked for Special 
326, and Elcho again repeated steadily : 

“ Special — 326 — left — here — on — Order — 
79 — at — seven-fifty-five p.m.” 

Martin Duffy bent before the message; young 
Giddings, who had been whispering to Tracy, 
dropped on a stool and covered his face. 

“ Don’t cry, Giddings.” It was Duffy who 


28 o 


Held for Orders 


spoke ; dry and parched his voice. “ It ’s nothing 
you — could help.” He looked around and saw 
Tracy at his elbow. “ Barnes,” he said, but he 
tried twice before his voice would carry. “ Barnes 
— they will meet in the Cinnamon cut. Giddings 
told you? Bob forgot, forgot my order. Run, 
Giddings, for Benedict Morgan and Doubleday 
and Carhart — quick ! ” 

Giddings ran, the Rat River call echoing 
again down the hall behind him. Rat River was 
closest to Rock Point — would get the first news 
of the wreck, and Martin Duffy was calling his 
recreant brother at the River ; but the River was 
silent. 

Doubleday and the company surgeon. Dr. Car- 
hart, rushed into the room almost together. Then 
came with a storm the wrecking boss, Benedict 
Morgan; it was only an evil hour that brought 
Benedict Morgan into the despatchers’ office. 
Stooped and silent, Martin Duffy, holding the chair, 
was calling Rat River. Carhart watched him just 
a moment, then he took Barnes Tracy aside and 


The Operators Story 281 

whispered — and, going back, bent over DufFy. 
The Chief pulled himself up. 

“Let Tracy take the key,” repeated the doctor. 
“ Get away from the table a minute, Martin. It 
may not be as bad as you think.” 

Duffy, looking into the surgeon’s face, put his 
hand on his arm. “ It ’s the De Molay train, the 
Special 326, with Bucks’s car, double-headed. Oh, 
my God — I can’t stop them. Doctor, they will 
meet! ” 

Carhart unfastened the fingers on his arm. “ Come 
away a minute. Let Tracy have the key,” he urged. 

“ A head-ender, eh ? ” croaked Benedict Morgan 
from the counter, and with a frightful oath. “ A 
head-ender I ” 

“ Shut up, you brute I ” hissed Carhart. Duffy’s 
hands were creeping queerly up the sides of his 
head. 

“ Sure,” growled Benedict Morgan, loweringly, 
“ sure. Shut up. Of course. Shut up.” 

Carhart was a quick man. He started for 
the wrecker, but Duffy, springing, stopped him. 


282 


Held for Orders 

‘‘ For God’s sake, keep cool, everybody,” he ex- 
claimed, piteously. There was no one else to talk, 
to give the orders. Bucks and Callahan both on 
the Special — maybe past order-giving now. Only 
Martin Duffy to take the double load and the double 
shame. He stared, dazed again, into the faces 
around as he held to the fiery surgeon. “ Morgan,” 
he added steadily, looking at the surly wrecker, 
“ get up your crew, quick. Doubleday, make up 
all the coaches in the yard for an ambulance train. 
Get every doctor in town to go with you. Tracy, 
clear the line.” 

The Master Mechanic and Benedict Morgan 
clattered down stairs. Carhart, running to the 
telephone, told Central to summon every medical 
man in the Bend, and hurried out. Before he had 
covered a block, roundhouse callers, like flaws of 
wind before a storm, were scurrying the streets, 
and from the tower of the fire-house sounded the 
harsh clang of the emergency gong for the wreckers. 

Caught where they could be caught, out of 
saloons, beds, poker joints. Salvation barracks, 


The Operator’s Story 283 

churches, — the men of the wrecking crew ran 
down the silent streets, waking now fast into life. 
Congregations were dispersed, hymns cut, prayers 
forgotten, bars deserted, hells emptied, barracks 
raided at that call, the emergency gong call, fell as a 
fire-bell, for the Mountain Division wrecking gang. 

While the yard crews shot up and down the 
spurs switching coaches into the relief train, Bene- 
dict Morgan with solid volleys of oaths was or- 
ganizing his men and filling them at the lunch 
counters with huge schooners of coffee. Car- 
hart pushed again through the jam of men and up 
to the despatchers’ office. Before and behind him 
crowded the local physicians with instrument bags 
and bandages. The ominous baggage deposited 
on the office floor, they sat down about the room or 
hovered around Carhart asking for details. Double- 
day, tall and grim, came over from the roundhouse. 
Benedict Morgan stamped up from the yard — the 
Mountain Division was ready. 

All three despatchers were in the room. John 
Mailers, the day man, stood near Tracy, who had 


284 Held for Orders 

relieved Giddings. The line was clear for the 
relief run. Elcho had been notified of the impend- 
ing disaster, and at Tracy’s elbow sat the Chief 
looking fixedly at the key — taking the bob of 
the sounder with his eye. A dozen men in the 
room were talking ; but they spoke as men who 
speaking wait on the life of a fuse. Duffy, with 
suspense deepening into frenzy, pushed Tracy’s 
hand from the key and, sliding into the chair, 
began once more to call his brother at Rat River. 

u T — R, T — R, T — R, T — ” clicked the 
River call. ‘‘ R, T — R,T — R, T — Bob — Bob 
— Bob,” spelled the sender. “ Answer me, an- 
swer, answer. R, T — R, T — R, T — R, T — ” 
And Barnes Tracy edged away and leaned back 
to where the shadow hid his face. And John 
Mailers, turning from the pleading of the current, 
stared gloomily out of the window across the yard 
shimmering under the double relay of arc lights; 
and young Giddings, who couldn’t stand it — just 
could rCt stand it — bending on his stool, shook 
with gulping sobs. 


The Operator's Story 285 

The others knew nothing of the heartbreaking 
in the little clicks. But they all knew the track — 
knew where the trains would meet; knew they 
could not by any possibility see each other till they 
whirled together on the curve of the Cinnamon 
cut or on the trestle west of it and they waited 
only for the breaking of the suspense that settled 
heavily over them. 

Ten, twenty, thirty, forty minutes went, with 
Martin Dulfy at intervals vainly calling. Then 
— as the crack opens in the field of ice, as the 
snow breaks in ^he mountain slide, as the sea 
gives up at last its dead, the sounder spoke — Rat 
River made the despatcher's call. And Martin 
Duffy, staring at the copper coil, pushed himself 
up in his chair like a man that chokes, caught 
smothering at his neck, and slipped wriggling to 
the floor. 

Carhart caught him up, but Duffy’s eyes stared 
meaningless past him. Rat River was calling him, 
but Martin Duffy was past the taking. Like the 
man next at the gun, Barnes T racy sprang into the 


Held for Orders 


286 

chair with the I, I, D. I'he surgeon, Giddings 
helping, dragged DufFy to the lounge in Callahan’s 
room — his Chief was more to Giddings then than 
the fate of Special 326. But soon confused voices 
began to ring from where men were crowding around 
the despatchers’ table. They echoed in to where the 
doctors worked over the raving Chief. And young 
Giddings, helping, began, too, to hear strange things 
from the other room. 

“ The moon — ” 

‘‘ The moon ? ” 

“The MOON!” 

“ What? ” 

Barnes T racy was trying to make himself heard : 

“ The moon, damn it I MOON I That ’s Eng- 
lish, ain’t it ? Moon.^^ 

“ Who ’s talking at Rat River ? ” demanded 
Benedict Morgan, hoarsely. 

“ Chick Neale, conductor of Third Eighty; their 
train is back at Rat River. God bless that man,” 
stammered Barnes Tracy, wiping his forehead fev- 
erishly ; “ he ’s an old operator. He says Bob DulFy 


The Operator’s Story 287 

is missing — tell Martin, quick, there is n’t any 
wreck — quick ! ” 

“ What does Neale say ? ” cried Doubleday with 
an explosion. 

Tracy thought he had told them, but he 
had n’t. “ He says his engineer, Abe Monsoon, 
was scared by the moon rising just as they cleared 
Kennel Butte,” explained Tracy unsteadily. “ He 
took it for the headlight of Special 326 and jumped 
from his engine. The fireman backed the train to 
Rat River — see ? ” 

While Tracy talked. Mailers at the key was get- 
ting it all. “ Look here,” he exclaimed, “ did you 
ever hear of such a mix-up in your life ? The head 
brakeman of the freight was in the cab, Neale says. 
He and the engineer were talking about the last 
Conclave train, wondering where they were going to 
meet it, when the brakeman spied the moon coming 
up around Kennel Butte curve. ‘ There’s the 326 
Special ! ’ he yelled, and lighted out the gangway. 
Monsoon reversed and jumped off after him so quick 
he knocked the fireman over in the coal. When 


288 


Held for Orders 


the fireman got up — he had n’t heard a word of 
it all — he could n’t see anything ahead but the 
moon. So he stops the train and backs up for the 
two guys. When Neale and he picked them up 
they ran right back to Rat River for orders. They 
never got to Rock Point at all — why, they never 
got two miles east of Rat River.” 

“ And where ’s Special 326 ? ” cried Doubleday. 

“ At Rock Point, you loco. She must be there 
and waiting yet for Third Eighty. The stopping 
of the freight gave her plenty of time to make the 
meeting-point, don’t you see, and there she is — 
sweating — yet. Neale is an old operator. By 
Heaven ! Give me a man of the key against the 
the world. Praise God from whom all blessings 
flow ( ” 

“ Then there is n’t to be any wreck ? ” ven- 
tured a shy little lady homeopathic physician, who 
had been crimped into the fray to help do up the 
mangled Knights and was modestly waiting her 
opportunity. 

“Not to-night,” announced Tracy with the 


The Operator's Story 289 

dignity of a man temporarily in charge of the en- 
tire division. 

A yell went out of the room like a tidal wave. 
Doubleday and Benedict Morgan had not spoken 
to each other since the night of the roundhouse 
fire — that was two years. They turned wonder- 
struck to each other. Doubleday impulsively put 
out his hand and, before he could pull it in again, 
the wrecking boss grabbed it like a pay check. 
Carhart, who was catching the news from the 
rattle of young Giddings, went wild trying to re- 
peat it to Duffy without losing it in his throat. 
The Chief was opening his eyes, trying to under- 
stand. 

Medical men of violently differing schools, allo- 
paths, homeopaths, osteopaths, eclectics — made 
their peace with a whoop. A red-headed druggist, 
who had rung himself in for a free ride to the hor- 
ror, threw his emergency packets into the middle 
of the floor. The doctors caught the impulse : 
instrument cases were laid with solemn tenderness 
on the heap, and a dozen crazy men, joining hands 


19 


290 Held for Orders 

around the pyred saws and gauze, struck up “ Old 
Hundred.” 

Engineer Monsoon was a new man, who had 
been over the division only twice before in his life, 
both times in daylight. For that emergency Abe 
Monsoon was the man of all others, because it takes 
more than an ordinary moon to scare a thorough- 
bred West End engineer. But Monsoon and his 
moon headlight had between them saved De Molay 
Four from the scrap. 

The relief arrangements and Monsoon’s head- 
light were the fun of it, but there was more. 
Martin Duffy lay eleven weeks with brain fever 
before they could say moon again to him. Bob 
had skipped into the mountains in the very hour 
that he had disgraced himself. He has never 
shown up at Medicine since ; but Martin is still 
Chief, and they think more of him on the Moun- 
tain district than ever. 

Bucks got the whole thing when De Molay Four 
reached Rat River that night. Bucks and Calla- 
han and Moore and Oyster and Pat Francis got 


The Operator’s Story 291 

it and smiled grimly. Nobody else on Special 326 
even dreamed of leaving a bone that Sunday 
night in the Cinnamon cut. All the rest of the 
evening Bucks smiled just the same at the Knights 
and the Knightesses, and they thought him for a 
bachelor wonderfully entertaining. 

A month later, when the old boys more or less 
ragged came straggling back from ’Frisco, Bucks’s 
crowd stayed over a train, and he told his Penn- 
sylvania cronies what they had slipped through in 
that delay at Rock Point. 

“Just luck,” laughed one of the Eastern super- 
intendents, who wore on his watch chain an enor- 
mous Greek cross with “ Our Trust is in God” 
engraved on it. “ Just luck,” he laughed, “ was n’t 
it?” 

“ Maybe,” murmured Bucks, looking through 
the Wickiup window at the Teton peaks. “That 
is — you might call it that — back on the Penn. 
Out here I guess they’d call it. Just God.” 





3 


tfi ■■ ,a,-ii ,ri 




Dave Hawk. 


✓ 





‘ Lvi 


i 1 


Held for Orders 


The Trainmaster’s Story 


OF THE OLD GUARD 



The Trainmaster’s Story 

OF THE OLD GUARD 

I NEVER found it very hard to get into 
trouble : as far back as I can remember 
that has come dead easy for me. 

When this happened I had n’t been railroading 
a month and I was up with my conductor on the 
carpet, sweating from sheer grogginess and excite- 
ment. The job of front-end brakeman on a 
mountain division is no great stake for a man 
ordinarily, but it was one for me, just then. We 
knew when we went into the superintendent’s office 
that somebody was to get fired ; the only ques- 
tion was, who ? — the train crew or the operator ? 
Our engine crew were out of it ; it was up to the 


296 Held for Orders ' 

conductor and to me. Had the operator displayed 
red signals ? The conductor said, no ; I said, no ; 
the operator said, yes : but he lied. We could n't 
prove it ; we could only put our word against his : 
and what made it the worse for me, my conductor 
was something of a liar himself. 

I stood beading in a cold sweat for I could see 
with half an eye it was going against us ; the 
superintendent, an up-and-up railroad man every 
inch and all business, but suspicious, was leaning 
the operator's way the strongest kind. 

There wasn't another soul in the little room as 
the three of us stood before the superintendent's 
desk except a passenger conductor, who sat behind 
me with his feet on the window ledge, looking out 
into the yard. 

“ Morrison's record in this office is clean," the 
superintendent was saying of the operator, who 
was doing us smooth as smokeless powder, “he 
has never to my knowledge lied in an investiga- 
tion. But, Allbers," continued the superinten- 
dent speaking bluntly to my conductor, “ you 've 


The Trainmaster’s Story 297 

never told a straight story about that Rat River 
switch matter yet. This man is a new man,” he 
added, throwing a hard look at me. “ Ordinarily 
I ’d be inclined to take the word of two men 
against one, but I don’t know one at all and the 
other has done me once. I can’t see anything for 
it but to take Morrison’s word and let you fellows 
both out. There was n’t any wreck, but that ’s 
not your fault ; not for a minute.” 

“ Mr. Rocksby,” I protested, speaking up to 
the division boss in a clean funk — the prospect of 
losing my job that way, through a lying operator, 
took the heart clean out of me — “ you don’t know 
me, it is true, but I pledge you my word of 
honor — ” 

‘‘ What ’s your word of honor ? ” asked the 
superintendent, cutting into me like a hatchet, “ I 
don’t know any more about your word of honor 
than I do about you.” 

What could I say ? There were men who did 
know me, but they were a long cry from the Rocky 
Mountains and the headquarters of the Mountain 


298 Held for Orders 

Division. I glanced about me from his face, gray 
as alkali, to Allbers, shuffling on the carpet, and 
to Morrison, as steady as a successful liar, taking 
my job and my reputation at one swallow ; and 
to the passenger conductor with the glossy black 
whiskers; but he was looking out the window. 
“ What do I know about your word of honor ? ” 
repeated Rocksby sharply. “Allbers, take your 
man and get your time.” 

A wave of helpless rage swept over me. The 
only thing I could think of, was strangling the 
lying operator in the hall. Then somebody spoke. 

“ Show your papers, you damn fool.” 

It came calm as sunshine and cold as a north- 
wester from the passenger conductor behind me, 
from Dave Hawk, and it pulled me into line like 
a bugle call. I felt my English all back at once. 
Everybody heard him and looked my way; again 
it was up to me. This time I was ready for the 
superintendent, or for that matter for the blooming 
Mountain Division. I had forgot all about my 
papers till Dave Hawk spoke. I put my hand, 


The Trainmaster’s Story 299 

shaking, into my inside vest pocket for a piece of 
oilskin — it was all I had left ; I was a good way 
from my base that year. I laid the oilskin on the 
superintendent’s table, unfolded it jealously and 
took out a medal and a letter, that in spite of 
the carefullest wrapping was creased and sweated. 
But the letter was from my captain and the bit of 
bronze was the Cross. Rocksby picked up the 
letter and read it. 

“ Have you been in the British Army ? ” he 
asked curtly. 

« Yes, sir.” 

He scowled a minute over Picton’s scrawl, laid 
it down and gratified his curiosity by picking up 
the medal. He studied the face of the token, 
looked curiously at the dingy red ribbon, twirled it 
and saw the words on the reverse, ‘‘For Valour,” 
and looked again at me. 

“ Where ’d you get this .? ” he asked indicating 
the Victoria. 

“ In the Soudan, sir.” 

Dave Hawk kept right on looking out the win- 


Held for Orders 


300 

dow. Neither my conductor nor the operator 
seemed to know just what the row was. Nobody 
spoke. 

“ What’ you doing here ? ” Rocksby went on. 

“ I came out to learn the cattle business.” His 
brows went up easy-like. “ They cleaned me out.” 
Brows dropped gentle-like. Then I went bad 
with mountain-fever,” and he looked decent at me. 

“You say you had your head out the cupola and 
saw the white signal ? ” he asked, sort of puzzled. 

“ I saw the white signal.” Rocksby looked at 
the operator Morrison. 

“We ’ll adjourn this thing,” said he at last, “ till 
I look into it a little further. For the present, go 
back to your runs.” 

We never heard any more of it. Allbers got 
out quick. I waited to pick up my stuff and 
turned to thank Dave Ha\vk; he was gone. 

It was n’t the first time Dave had pulled me out 
of the water. About two weeks before that I had 
crawled one night up on the front platform of the 
at Peace River to steal a ride to Medicine 


The Trainmaster’s Story 301 

Bend on Number One. It was Dave’s train. I 
had been kicked out of the McCloud hospital two 
days before without a cent, or a friend on earth 
outside the old country, and I had n’t a mind to 
bother the folks at home any more, come Conan 
or the devil. 

The night was bitter bad, black as a Fuzzy and 
sleeting out of the foothills like manslaughter. 
When the train stopped at Rosebud for water, 
what with gripping the icy hand-rail and trying 
to keep my teeth steady on my knees I must have 
been a hard sight. Just as the train was ready to 
pull out, Dave came by and poked his lantern full 
in my face. 

He was an older man than I, a good bit older, 
for I was hardly more than a kid then, only spin- 
dling tall, and so thin I could n’t tell a stomach 
ache from a back ache. As I sat huddled down 
on the lee step with my cap pulled over my head 
and ears, he poked his light full into my face and 
snapped, “ Get out ! ” 

If it had been a headlight I could n’t have been 


Held for Orders 


302 

worse scared, and I found afterward he carried the 
brightest lamp on the division. I looked up into 
his face and he looked into mine. I wonder if in 
this life it is n’t mostly in the face after all ? 
I could n’t say anything, I was shaking in a chill 
as I pulled myself together and climbed down into 
the storm. 

Yet I never saw a face harder in some ways than 
Dave Hawk’s. His visor hid his forehead and a 
blackbeard covered his face till it left only his straight 
cold nose and a dash of olive white under the eyes. 
His whiskers loomed high as a Cossack’s and his 
eyes were onyx black with just such a glitter. He 
knew it was no better than murder to put me off 
in that storm at a mountain siding : I knew it ; 
but I did n’t much care for I knew before very 
long I should fall off, anyway. After I crawled 
down he stood looking at me, and with nothing 
better on I stood looking at him. 

“ If you get up there again I ’ll break your 
neck,” he promised, holding up his lantern. I 
was quiet ; the nerve was out of me. 


The Trainmaster's Story 303 

“ Where you going ? ” he asked shortly. 

“ Medicine Ben ” 

“ Get into the smoker, you damn fool.” 

How it galvanized me. For twenty-four hours 
I had n’t eaten. I was just out of a hospital bed 
and six weeks of mountain fever, but I braced at 
his words like a Sioux buck. I hurried back ahead 
of him to the smoking car, drenched wet, and 
tough, I know. I looked so tough that the brake- 
man grabbed me the minute I opened the frontdoor 
and tried to kick me out. I turned snarling then, 
crazy as a wolf all in a second, and somehow 
backed the brakeman against the water cooler with 
his windpipe twisted in my bony fingers like 
a corkscrew. The train was moving out. I had 
been cuffed and kicked till I would rather kill 
somebody than not ; this seemed a fair chance for a 
homicide. When the poor fellow’s wind went 
off — he wasn’t much of a scrapper, I fancy — 
he whipped around in the aisle like a dying 
rooster. As he struggled in my grip there be- 
hind him in the doorway stood Dave, lantern in 


Held for Orders 


304 

hand, looking on with a new face. This time he 
was smiling — Dave’s smile meant just the parting 
of his lips over a row of glistening teeth ; per- 
fectly even teeth and under his black mustache 
whiter than ivory. It appeared to amuse him to 
see me killing the brakeman. The instant I saw 
Dave I let go and he watched the crestfallen train- 
man pull himself together. 

“Guess you ’ll let him alone now, won’t you ? ” 
said Dave pleasantly to my rattled assailant. “ Sit 
down,” he growled harshly at me, stringing his 
lantern on his arm. He walked unconcernedly 
down the aisle, and I dropped exhausted into 
the front seat facing the Baker heater. It was 
heavenly hot; red hot. I have loved a car heater 
ever since, and Baker to me, is hardly lower 
than the angels. My togs began to steam, my 
blood began to flow, the train boy gave me a 
wormy apple, an Irishman with a bottle of rank 
whiskey gave me a stinger and I wanted to live 
again. I curled up in the seat and in five minutes 
I was roasting, oh, such a heavenly roast ; and 


The Trainmaster’s Story 305 

dozing, Lord ! what a heavenly doze, before that 
Baker heater. All night the forward truck beat 
and pounded under me : all night I woke and slept 
in the steaming, stinking air of the hot car. And 
whenever I opened my eyes I saw always the same 
thing, a topping tall conductor looming in the 
aisle, his green-hooded lamp, like a semaphore 
under his arm. And above, in the gloom, a bush 
of black beard and a pair of deep-set, shining eyes 
back under a peaked cap. Dave often comes back 
as I saw him, waking and dreaming, that night in 
the smoker of Number One. 

It was breaking day when he bent over me. 

“We’re getting into the Bend,” he said gruffly. 
“ Got any money for breakfast ? ” 

“I haven’t a cent on God’s earth.” He put 
his hand in his pocket and pulling out a handful of 
loose bills shoved one into my fingers. 

“ I ’ll take it from you and gladly,” I said sitting 
up. “ But I ’m not a beggar nor a tramp.” 

“ Off track?” 


20 


Held for Orders 


306 

“Yes. I’m going to enlist — ” His teeth 
flashed. “ That ’s worse than railroading, ain’t it ? ” 
Something came into my head like a rocket. 

“ If I could get started railroading ” 

“ Get started easy enough.” 

That ’s how I happened to show him my Vic- 
toria. He gave me a card to the trainmaster, and 
next day I went to braking for Allbers, who, by 
the way, was the biggest liar I ever knew. 

But the morning I got into Medicine Bend that 
first time on Number One I had another scare. I 
went into the lunch room for coffee and sand- 
wiches and threw my bill at the boy. He opened 
it, looked at it and looked at me. 

“Well,” I growled, for I was impudent with 
luck and a hot stomach. “ Good, ain’t it ? ” 

“ Smallest you got ? ” 

I nodded as if I had a pocket full. He hustled 
around and came back with a handful of money. 
I said nothing but when he spread it out before 
me I sat paralysed. I had just assumed that Dave 
had given me a dollar. Sinkers, deducting the 


The Trainmaster’s Story 307 

price of two coffees and six sandwiches from the 
bill counted out nineteen dollars and thirty cents 
for me. 

That change kept me running for a month, and 
after my first pay day I hunted up Dave to pay 
him back. I found him in the evening. He was 
sitting alone on the eating-house porch, his feet up 
against the rail, looking at the mountains in the 
sunset. 

“ Never mind,” he said, as I held out a twenty 
dollar bill and tried to speak my little piece. 
He did not move except to wave back my 
hand. 

“ Oh, but I can’t let you do that ” I pro- 

tested. 

“ Put up your money, Tommie.” He called 
me Tommie. 

“ No,” he repeated putting by my hand ; his 
face set hard, and when Dave’s face did set it set 
stony. “ Put up your money ; you don’t owe me 
anything. I stole it.” 

It was a queer deal out on the West End in 


308 Held for Orders 

those days. It was a case of wide open from the 
river to the Rockies. Everybody on the line from 
the directors to the car-tinks were giving the com- 
pany the worst of it. The section hands hooked 
the ties for the maintenance, the painters drank the 
alcohol for the shellac, the purchasing agent had 
more fast horses than we had locomotives, and 
what made it discouraging for the conductors, the 
auditors stole what little money the boys did turn 
in. 

A hard place to begin railroading the old line 
was then: but that ’s where I had to tackle the 
game, and in all the hard crowd I mixed with 
Dave Hawk was the only big man on the division. 
There were others there who fixed the thing up 
by comparing notes on their collections and turn- 
ing in percentages to make their reports look right. 
But Dave was not a conspirator; never made a 
confidant of any man in his stealing or his spend- 
ing, and despised their figuring. He did as he 
pleased and cared for no one ; no superior had any 
terror for Dave. He had a wife somewhere back 


.The Trainmaster’s Story 309 

east of the river, they said, that had sold him out — 
that’s why he was in the mountains — and he 
lived among free and easy men a lonely life. If 
anybody ever got close to him, I think maybe I 
did, though I was still only a freight conductor 
when the lightning struck the division. 

It came with a clean sweep through the general 
offices at the River. Everybody in the auditing 
department, the executive heads down to general 
manager and a whole raft of East End conductors. 
It was a shake-out from top to bottom, and the 
bloods on our division went white and sickly very 
fast. 

Of course it was somebody’s gain. When the 
heads of our passenger conductors began to drop, 
they began setting up freight men. Rocksby had 
resigned a year earlier, and Haverly, his successor, 
an ex-despatcher and as big a knave as there was 
on the pay roll, let the men out right and left 
with the sole idea of saving his own scalp. By 
the time I was put up to a passenger train the old 
force was pretty much cleared out except Dave. 


Held for Orders 


310 

Every day almost, we looked to see him go. 
Everybody loved him because he was a master 
railroad man, and everybody except Dave himself 
was apprehensive about his future. He moved on 
just the same, calm and cold as icewater, taking 
the same old chances, reckless of everything and 
everybody. I never knew till afterward, but the 
truth was Haverly with all his bluff talk was just 
enough afraid of Dave Hawk to want to let him 
alone. The matter, though, focused one day up in 
the old office in an unexpected way. 

Haverly ’s own seat got so hot that bedeviled by 
his fears of losing it and afraid to discharge Dave, 
who now sailed up and down the line reckless 
as any pirate of the Spanish Main, he cowered, 
called Dave into the little room at the Wickiup 
and asked him to resign. In all the storm that 
raged on the division the old conductor alone had 
remained calm. Every day it was somebody’s 
head off ; every night a new alarm ; Dave alone 
ignored it all. He was, through it all, the shining 
mark, the daredevil target ; yet he bore a charmed 


The Trainmaster’s Story 31 1 

life and survived every last associate. Then 
Haverly asked him to resign. Dave, bitter angry, 
faced him with black words in his throat. 

“ It ’s come to a showdown,” muttered the 
superintendent uneasily after a minute’s talking. 
“ Do you want to resign ? ” 

Dave eyed the mountains coldly. “ No.” 

“ You ’ll have to — ” 

“ Have to ? ” Hawk whirled dark as a storm. 
“ Have to ? Who says so ? ” 

The superintendent shifted the paperweight on 
the desk uncomfortably. 

‘‘ Why should I resign ? ” demanded the old 
conductor angrily. “ Resign ? ” He rose from 
his chair. “ You know I ’m a thief. You ’re 
a thief yourself. You helped make me one. I ’ve 
carried more men for you than for anybody else 
on the whole division. I don’t resign for anybody. 
Discharge me, damn you. I don’t ask any odds 
of you.” 

Haverly met it sullenly, yet he did n’t dare do 
anything. He knew Dave could ruin him any 


312 Held for Orders 

day he chose to open his mouth. What he did 
not know was that Dave Hawk was molded in a 
class of men different from his own. Even dis- 
honor was safe in the hands of Dave Hawk. 

There was no change after, except that darker, 
moodier, lonelier than ever, Dave moved along on 
his runs, the last of the Old Guard. Better railroad 
man than he never took a train out of division. 
Stress of wind or stress of weather, storm, flood or 
blockade, Dave Hawk’s trains came and went on 
time or very close. So he rode, grim old priva- 
teer, with his letters . of marque on the company’s 
strongbox, and Haverly trembled night and day till 
that day came that fear had foretold to him. A 
clap of thunder struck the Wickiup and Haverly’s 
head fell low ; and Dave Hawk sailed boldly on. 

I was extra passenger man when John Stanley 
Bucks took the West End. He came from south 
of our country, and we heard great things about 
the new superintendent and about what would 
happen as soon as he got into the saddle. What 
few of the old men in the Wickiup were left 


The Trainmaster’s Story 313 

looked at Bucks just once and began to arrange 
their temporal affairs. His appearance bore out 
his reputation. Only, everybody while pretty 
clear in his own mind as to what he would do — 
that is, as to what he would have to do — won- 
dered what Dave would do. 

He and Bucks met. I could n’t for the life of 
me help thinking when they struck hands, this 
grizzled mountaineer and this contained, strong, 
soldierly executive who had come to command us, 
of another meeting, I once saw when I carried 
Crook out on a special and watched him at Bear 
Dance strike hands with the last of the big fight- 
ing chiefs of the mountain Sioux. 

For three months Bucks sat his new saddle 
without a word or an act to show what he was 
thinking : then there came from the little room a 
general order that swept right and left from train- 
master to wrecking boss. The last one of the old 
timers in the operating department went except 
Dave Hawk. 

The day the order was bulletined Bucks sent 


314 Held for Orders 

for Dave; sent word by me he wanted to see 
him. 

“ Come on,” said Dave to me when I gave him 
the message. 

“ What do you want me for ? ” 

“ Come on,” he repeated, and, greatly against 
my inclination, I went up with him. I looked for 
a scene. 

Dave, you Ve been running here a good while, 
have n’t you ? ” Bucks began. 

“ Long as anybody, I guess,” said Dave curtly. 

“ How many years ? ” 

“ Nineteen.” 

“ There ’s been some pretty lively shake-outs 
on the system lately,” continued Bucks ; the 
veteran conductor looked at him coldly. “ I am 
trying to shape things here for an entire new deal.” 

“ Don’t let me stand in your way,” returned 
Dave grimly. 

‘‘ That ’s what I want to see you about.” 

“ It need n’t take long,” blurted Dave. 

“Then I ’ll tell you what I want ” 


The Trainmaster's Story 315 

“ I don’t resign. You can discharge me any 
minute.” 

I would n’t ask any man to resign, Dave, if 
I wanted to discharge him. Don’t make a mis- 
take like that. I suppose you will admit there ’s 
room for improvement in the running of this 
division ? ” 

Dave never twitched. “ A whole lot of im- 
provement,” Bucks, with perceptible emphasis, 
added. It came from the new superintendent as a 
sort of gauntlet and Dave picked it up. 

“ I guess that ’s right enough,” he replied can- 
didly, “ there is room for a whole lot of improve- 
ment. If I sat where you do I ’d fire every man 
that stood in the way of it, too.” 

“ That ’s why I ’ve sent for you,” Bucks 
resumed. 

“ Then drop the chinook talk and give me my 
time.” 

You don’t understand me yet, Dave. I want 
you to give up your run. I want your friend, 
Burnes here, to take your run ” 


3i 6 Held for Orders 

A queer shadow went over Dave’s face. When 
Bucks began he was getting a thunderstorm on. 
Somehow the way it ended, the way it was coming 
about — putting me into his place — I, the only 
boy on the division he cared “ a damn ” about — 
it struck him, as it struck me, all in a heap. He 
could n’t say a word ; his eyes went out the win- 
dow into the mountains: something in it looked 
like fate. For my part I felt murder guilty. 

“ What I want you to do, Dave,” added Bucks 
evenly, “ is to come into the office here with me 
and look after the train crews. Just at present 
I ’ve got to lean considerably on a trainmaster, do 
you want the job ? ” 

The silent conductor turned to stone. 

“The men who own the road are new men, 
Dave ; they did n’t steal it. They bought it and 
paid for it. They want a new deal and they pro- 
pose to give a new deal to the men. They will 
pay salaries a man can live on honestly; they 
will give no excuse for knocking down ; they want 
what ’s coming to them, and they propose the men 


The Trainmaster's Story 317 

shall have their right share of it in the pay 
checks. 

“ But there ’s more than that in it. They want 
to build up the operating force, as fast as it can be 
built, from the men in the ranks. I aim to make 
a start now on this division. If you ’re with me, 
hang up your coat here the first of the month, and 
take the train crews.” 

Dave left the office groggy. The best Bucks 
could do he could n’t get a positive answer out of 
him. He was overcome and could n’t focus on the 
proposition. Bucks saw how he had gone to pieces 
and managed diplomatically to leave the matter 
open, Callahan, whom Bucks had brought with 
him as assistant, filling in meanwhile as trainmaster. 

The matter was noised. It was known that 
Dave, admittedly the brainiest and most capable of 
the Old Guard had been singled out, regardless of 
his past record for promotion. I ’m not here 
sitting in judgment on what was done last year,” 
Bucks had said plainly. ‘‘ It ’s what is done this 
year and next that will count in this office.” And 


318 Held for Orders 

the conductors, thinking there was a chance, be- 
lieving that at last if they did their work right they 
would get their share of the promotions, began to 
carry their lanterns as if they had more important 
business than holding up stray- fares. 

Meantime Dave hung to his. run. Somehow 
the old run had grown a part of him and he 
could n’t give it up. When he told Bucks at the 
end of the week that he would like another week 
to make his decision the superintendent waved it 
to him. Everybody began to make great things 
of Dave : some of the boys called him trainmaster 
and told him to drop his punch and give Tommie 
a show. 

He did n’t take the humor the way one would 
expect. Always silent he grew more than that; 
sombre and dejected. We never saw a smile on 
his face. “ Dave is off,” muttered Henry Cava- 
naugh, his old baggageman, ‘‘ I don’t under- 
stand it. He ’s off. You ought to talk to him, 
Tommie. You’re the only man on the division 
can do it.” 


The Trainmaster’s Story 319 

I was ordered west that night to bring a military 
special from Washakie. I rode up on Dave’s 
train. The hind Los Angeles sleeper was loaded 
light, and when Dave had worked the train and 
walked into the stateroom to sort his collections, I 
followed him. We sat half an hour alone and un- 
disturbed, but he would n’t talk. It was a heavy 
train and the wind was high. 

We made Rat River after midnight, and I was 
still sitting alone in the open stateroom when I saw 
Dave’s green light coming down the darkened 
aisle. He walked in, put his lamp on the floor, sat 
down, and threw his feet on the cushions. 

‘‘How ’s Tommie to-night ? ” he asked, leaning 
back as if he had n’t seen me before, in his old 
teasing way. He played light heart sometimes; 
but it was no more than played: that was easy 
seeing. 

“ How ’s Dave? ” He turned, pulled the win- 
dow shade and looked out. There was a moon 
and the night was bright, only windy. 

“ What are you going to do with Bucks, Dave ? ” 


Held for Orders 


320 

“ Do you want my punch, Tommie ?” 

‘‘You know better than that, don’t you ?” 

“ I guess so.” 

“ You ’re blue to-night. What ’s the matter ? ” 
He shifted and it was n’t like him to shift. 

“I’m going to quit the West End.” 

“Quit? What do you mean? You’re not 
going to throw over this trainmaster offer ? ” 

“ I ’m going to quit.” 

“ What ’s the use,” he went on slowly. “ How 
can I take charge of conductors, talk to conduc- 
tors ? How can I discharge a conductor for steal- 
ing when he knows I ’m a thief myself ? They 
know it 5 Bucks knows it. There ’s no place 
among men for a thief.” 

“ Dave, you take it too hard ; everything ran 
wide open here. You ’re the best railroad man 
on this division ; everybody, old and new, admits 
that.” 

“ I ought to be a railroad man. I held down a 
division on the Pan Handle when I was thirty 
years old.” 


The Trainmaster’s Story 321 

‘‘ Were you a railroad superintendent at thirty ? ” 
“ I was a trainmaster at twenty-seven. I ’m 
forty-nine now, and a thief. The woman that 
ditched me is dead: the man she ran away with is 
dead : my baby is dead, long ago.” He was look- 
ing out, as he spoke, on the flying desert ashen in 
the moonlight. In the car the passengers were hard 
asleep and we heard only the slew of the straining 
flanges and the muffled beat of the heavy truck 
under us. 

There ’s no law on earth that will keep a man 
from leaving the track once in a while,” I argued ; 
“ there ’s none to keep him from righting his trucks 
when the chance is offered. I say, a man’s bound 
to do it. If you won’t do it here, choose your 
place and I ’ll go with you. This is a big coun- 
try, Dave. Hang it. I’ll go anywhere. You 
are my partner, are n’t you ? ” 

He bent to pick up his lantern, “Tommie, 
you ’re a great boy.” 

“Well, I mean it.” He looked at his watch, I 
pulled mine : it was one o’clock. 


21 


Held for Orders 


322 

“ Better go to sleep, Tommie.” I looked up 
into his face as he rose. He looked for an in- 
stant steadily into mine. “ Go to bed, Tommie,” 
he smiled, pulling down his visor, and turning, he 
walked slowly forward. I threw myself on the 
couch and drew my cap over my eyes. The first 
thing I felt was a hand on my shoulder. Then I 
realized I had been asleep and that the train was 
standing still. A man was bending over me, lan- 
tern in hand. It was the porter. 

‘‘ What ’s wrong ? ” I exclaimed. 

“ There ’s trouble up ahead, Mr. Burnes,” he 
exclaimed huskily. I sprang to my feet. “ Have 
you got your pistol ?” he stuttered. 

Somebody came running down the aisle and the 
porter dodged like a hare behind me. It was the 
hind-end brakeman, but he was so scared he could 
not speak. I hurried forward. 

Through the head Los Angeles sleeper, the San 
Francisco cars and the Portland I ran without 
meeting a living soul ; but the silence was omin- 
ous. When I caught a glimpse of the inside of 


The Trainmaster’s Story 323 

the chair car, I saw the ferment. Women were 
screaming and praying, and men were burrowing 
under the foot-rests. “ They Ve killed everybody 
in the smoker,” shouted a travelling man, grabbing 
me. 

“ Damnation, make way, won’t you ! ” I ex- 
claimed, pushing away from him through the mob. 
At the forward door, taking me for one of the 
train robbers, there was another panic. Passengers 
from the smoker were jammed together there like 
sardines. I had to pile them bodily across the 
seats to get through and into the forward car. 

It was over. The front lamps were out and 
the car smoking bluish. A cowboy hung pitched 
head and arms down over the heater seat. In the 
middle of the car Henry Cavanaugh, crouching in 
the aisle, held in his arms Dave Hawk. At the 
dark front end of the coach I saw the outline of a 
man sprawled on his face in the aisle. The news 
agent crawled out from under a seat. It must 
have been short and horribly sharp. 

They had flagged the train east of Bear Dance. 


524 Held for Orders 

Two men boarded the front platform of the 
smoker and one the rear. But the two in front 
opened the smoker door just as Dave was hurrying 
forward to investigate the stop. He was no man 
to ask questions. He saw the masks and covered 
them instantly. Dave Hawk any time and any- 
where was a deadly shot. Without a word he 
opened on the forward robbers. A game cowboy 
back of him pulled a gun and cut into it ; and was 
the first to go down, wounded. But the train boy 
said, Hawk himself had dropped the two head men 
almost immediately after the firing began and stood 
free handed when the man' from the rear plat- 
form put a Winchester against his back. Even 
then, with a hole blown clean through him, he had 
whirled and fired again 5 we found the man’s blood 
on the platform in the morning, but, whoever he 
was, he got to the horses and got away. 

When I reached Dave, he lay in his baggage- 
man’s arms. We threw the carrion into the bag- 
gage car and carried the cowboy and the conductor 
back into the forward sleeper. I gave the go- 


The Trainmaster’s Story 325 

ahead orders and hurried again to the side of the 
last of the Old Guard. Once his eyes opened, 
wandering stonily j but he never heard me, never 
knew me, never spoke. As his train went that 
morning into division he went with it. When we 
stopped, his face was cold. It was up to the 
Grand Master. 

A game man always, he was never a cruel one. 
He called himself a thief. He never hesitated 
with the other men high and low to loot the com- 
pany. The big looters were financiers : Dave was 
only a thief, yetr gave his life for the very law he 
trampled under foot. 

Thief, if you please ; I don’t know : we need n’t 
quarrel about the word he branded himself with. 
Yet a trust of money, of friendship, of duty were 
safer far in Dave Hawk’s hands than in the hands 
of abler financiers. 

I hold him not up for a model, neither glory in 
his wickedness. When I was friendless, he was 
my friend : his story is told. 


r 



’A' 




;i;f w:'^' • 

fc^’LLVjL‘\V 




' ” I . - . ' 


V 1 


• >. 


•)s •'. 



.vs* 
• ' ‘ ' 


'-P 


- 4 . 


* ’i*f ^ *■ 


f I 


t-»~ • • 



k 

« 

fi 




«!. 






• * ’ ♦ I ^ 

', • ^ •it'i 

' I * 



• ,« 


I'-:** 



r \ i 


T.:* 




• • 


c.i 



• V 


V*' 



«■ • 


Kiv A 




I 


« • 




# 

I 

.^ 7 ;=i 4 . 


. 'X 

V •> . • .•• 


♦ 
r f 








w 


4 


I 


Held for Orders 


The Yellow Mail Story 

JIMMIE THE WIND 






The Yellow Mail Story 

JIMMIE THE WIND 

T here wasn’t another engineer on the 
division that dared talk to Doubleday the 
way Jimmie Bradshaw talked. 

But Jimmie had a grievance, and every time he 
thought about it, it made him nervous. 

Ninety-six years. It seemed a good while to 
wait ; yet in the regular course of events on the 
Mountain Division there appeared no earlier pros- 
pect of Jimmie’s getting a passenger run. 

“ Got your rights, ain’t you ? ” said Doubleday, 
when Jimmie complained. 

I have and I have n’t,” grumbled Jimmie, 
winking hard; “there’s younger men than I am 
on the fast runs.” 


Held for Orders 


330 

‘‘ They got in on the strike ; you Ve been told 
that a hundred times. We can’t get up another 
strike just to fix you out on a fast run. Hang on 
to your freight. There ’s better men than you in 
Ireland up to their belt in the bog, Jimmie.” 

“ It ’s a pity they did n’t leave you there, 
Doubleday.” 

“You ’d have been a good while hunting for a 
freight run if they had.” 

Then Jimmie would get mad and shake his 
finger and talk fast : “ Just the same, I ’ll have a 
fast run here when you ’re dead.” 

“ Maybe ; but I ’ll be alive a good while yet, my 
son,” the master mechanic would laugh. Then 
Jimmie would walk olF very warm, and when he 
got into the clear with himself, he would wink furi- 
ously and say friction things about Doubleday that 
need n’t now be printed, because it is different. 
However, the talk always ended that way, and 
Jimmie Bradshaw knew it always would end that 
way. 

The trouble was, no one on the division would 


The Yellow Mail Story 331 

take Jimmie seriously, and he felt that the ambition 
of his life would never be fulfilled ; that he would 
go plugging to gray hairs and the grave on an old 
freight train; and that even when he got to the 
right side of the Jordan there would still be some- 
thing like half a century between him and a fast 
run. It was funny to hear him complaining about 
it, for everything, even his troubles, came funny to 
him, and in talking he had an odd way of stutter- 
ing with his eyes, which were red. In fact, Jim- 
mie was nearly all red ; hair, face, hands — they 
said his teeth were sandy. 

When the first rumors about the proposed Yel- 
low Mail reached the mountains Jimmie was run- 
ning a new ten-wheeler; breaking her in on a 
freight “ for some fellow without a lick o’ sense to 
use on a limited passenger run,” as Jimmie ob- 
served bitterly. The rumors about the mail came 
at first like stray mallards, opening signs of winter, 
and as the season advanced flew thicker and faster. 
Washington never was very progressive in the 
matter of improving the transcontinental service, 


Held for Orders 


332 

but once by mistake they put in a postmaster- 
general down there, who would n’t take the old 
song. When the bureau fellows that put their 
brains up in curl papers told him it could n’t be done 
he smiled softly, and sent for the managers of the 
crack lines across the continent, without suspecting 
how it bore incidentally on Jimmie Bradshaw’s 
grievance against his master mechanic. 

The postmaster-general called the managers of 
the big lines, and they had a dinner at Chamber- 
lain’s, and they told him the same thing. “ It has 
been tried,” they said in the old, tired way ; “ really 
it can’t be done.” 

“ California has been getting the worst of it for 
years on the mail service,” persisted the postmaster- 
general moderately. “ But Californians ought to 
have the best of it. We don’t think anything 
about putting New York mail in Chicago in twenty 
hours. It ought to be simple to cut half a day 
across the continent and give San Francisco Jier 
mail a day earlier. Where’s the fall down ? ” he 
asked, like one refusing no for an answer. 


The Yellow Mail Story 333 

The general managers looked at our representa- 
tive sympathetically, and coughed ^cigar smoke his 
way to hide him. 

“ West of the Missouri,” murmured a Pennsyl- 
vania swell, who pulled indifferently at a fifty-cent 
cigar. Everybody at the table took a drink on the 
expose^ except the general manager who sat at that 
time for the Rocky Mountains. 

The West End representative was unhappily ac- 
customed to facing the finger of scorn on such 
occasions. It had become with our managers a 
tradition. There was never a conference of trans- 
continental lines in which we were not scoffed at 
as the weak link in the chain of everything — mail, 
passenger, specials, what not — the trouble was in- 
variably laid at our door. 

This time a new man was sitting for the line at 
the Chamberlain dinner; a youngish man with a 
face that set like cement when the West End was 
trod on. 

The postmaster-general was inclined, from the 
reputation we had, to look on our man ^s one 


Held for Orders 


334 

looks at a dog without a pedigree, or at a dray 
horse in a bunch of standard-breds. But some- 
thing in the mouth of the West End man gave him 
pause; since the Rough Riders, it has been a bit 
different with verdicts on things Western. The 
postmaster-general suppressed a rising sarcasm with 
a sip of Chartreuse, for the dinner was ripening, 
and waited; nor did he mistake, the West Ender 
was about to speak. 

Why west of the Missouri ? ” he asked, with 
a lift of the face not altogether candid. The Penn- 
sylvania man shrugged his brows ; to explain might 
have seemed indelicate. 

“ If it is put through, how much of it do you 
propose to take yourself?” inquired our man, 
looking evenly at the Allegheny official. 

“ Sixty-five miles, including stops from the New 
York post-office to Canal Street,” replied the Penn- 
sylvania man, and his words flowed with irritating 
ease. 

“ What do you take ? ” continued the man 
with the jaw, turning to the Burlington repre- 


The Yellow Mail Story 335 

sentative, who was struggling, belated, with an 
artichoke. ^ 

‘‘ About seventy from Canal to Tenth and Mason. 
Say, seventy,” repeated the ‘‘ Q ” manager, with 
the lordliness of a man who has miles to throw at 
almost anybody, and knows it. 

“Then suppose we say sixty-five from Tenth 
and Mason to Ogden,” suggested the West Ender. 
There was a well-bred stare the table round, a lift- 
ing of glasses to mask expressions that might give 
pain. Sixty-five miles an hour? Through the 
Rockies ? 

The postmaster-general struck the table quick 
and heavily ; he did n’t want to let it get away. 
“Why, hang it, Mr. Bucks,” he exclaimed with 
emphasis, “if you will say sixty, the business is 
done. We don’t ask you to do the Rockies in the 
time these fellows take to cut the Alleghenies. Do 
sixty, and I will put mail in ’Frisco a day earlier 
every week in the year.” 

“Nothing on the West End to keep you from 
doing it,” said General Manager Bucks. He 


336 Held for Orders 

had been put up then only about six months. 
ccBut ” 

Every one looked at the young manager. The 
Pennsylvania man looked with confidence, for he 
instantly suspected there must be a string to such 
a proposition, or that the new representative was 
“ talking through his hat.” 

“But what?” asked the Cabinet member, 
uncomfortably apprehensive. 

“We are not putting on a sixty-five mile sched- 
ule just because we love our country, you under- 
stand, nor to heighten an already glorious reputation. 
Oh, no,” smiled Bucks faintly, “ we are doing it 
for ‘the stuff.’ You put up the money; we put 
up the speed. Not sixty miles ; sixty-five — from 
the Missouri to the Sierras. No; no more wine. 
Yes, I will take a cigar.” 

The trade was on from that minute. Bucks 
said no more then ; he was a good listener. But 
next day, when it came to talking money, he talked 
more money into the West End treasury for one 
year’s running than was ever talked before on a 


The Yellow Mail Story 337 

mail contract for the best three years’ work we 
ever did. 

When they asked him how much time he wanted 
to get ready, and told him to take plenty, three 
months was stipulated. The contracts were drawn, 
and they were signed by our people without hesita- 
tion because they knew Bucks. But while the 
preparations for the fast schedule were being made, 
the government weakened on signing. Nothing 
ever got through a Washington department with- 
out hitch, and they said our road had so often failed 
on like propositions that they wanted a test. There 
was a deal of wrangling, then a test run was agreed 
on by all the roads concerned. If it proved suc- 
cessful, if the mail was put to the Golden Gate on 
the second of the schedule, public opinion and the 
interests in the Philippines, it was concluded, would 
justify the heavy premium asked for the service. 

In this way the dickering and the figuring be-r 
came, in a measure, public, and keyed up everybody 
interested to a high pitch. We said nothing for 
publication, but under Bucks’s energy sawed wood 


22 


338 Held for Orders 

for three whole months. Indeed, three months goes 
as a day getting a system into shape for an extraor- 
dinary schedule. Success meant with us prestige; 
but failure meant obloquy for the road and for our 
division chief who had been so lately called to 
handle it. 

The real strain, it was clear, would come on his 
old, the Mountain, division ; and to carry out the 
point, rested on the Motive Power of the Mountain 
Division ; hence, concretely, on Doubleday, master 
mechanic of the hill country. 

In thirty days. Neighbor, superintendent of the 
Motive Power, called for reports from the division 
master mechanics on the preparations for the Yel- 
low Mail run, and they reported progress. In 
sixty days he called again. The subordinates re- 
ported well except Doubleday. Doubleday said 
merely, “ Not ready” ; he was busy tinkering with 
his engines. There was a third call in eighty days, 
and on the eighty-fifth a peremptory call. Every- 
body said ready except Doubleday. When Neighbor 
remonstrated sharply he would say only that he 


V 


The Yellow Mail Story 339 

would be ready in time. That was the most he 
would promise, though it was generally understood 
that if he failed to deliver the goods he would have 
to make way for somebody that could. 

The Plains Division of the system was marked up 
for seventy miles an hour, and, if the truth were 
told, a little better ; but, with all the help they could 
give us, it still left sixty for the mountains to take 
care of, and the Yellow Mail proposition was con- 
ceded to be the toughest affair the Motive Power at 
Medicine Bend had ever faced. However, forty- 
eight hours before the mail left the New York post- 
office Doubleday wired to Neighbor, ‘‘ Ready ” ; 
Neighbor to Bucks, “ Ready ” ; and Bucks to 
W ashington, “ Ready ” — and we were ready from 
end to end. 

Then the orders began to shoot through the moun- 
tains. The test run was of especial importance, be- 
cause the signing of the contract was believed to 
depend on the success of it. Once signed, acci- 
dents and delays might be explained ; for the test 
run there must be no delays. Despatchers were 


Held for Orders 


34 ° 

given the eleven, which meant Bucks ; no lay-outs, 
no slows for the Yellow Mail. Roadmasters were 
notified ; no track work in front of the Yellow 
Mail. Bridge gangs were warned, yard masters 
instructed, section bosses cautioned, track walkers 
spurred — the system was polished like a barkeep- 
er’s diamond, and swept like a parlor car for the 
test flight of the Yellow Mail. 

Doubleday, working like a boiler washer, spent 
all day Thursday and all Thursday night in the 
roundhouse. He had personally gone over the en- 
gines that were to take the racket in the mountains. 
Ten-wheelers they were, the 1012 and the 1014, 
with fifty-six-inch drivers and cylinders big enough 
to sit up and eat breakfast in. Spick and span 
both of them, just long enough out of the shops to 
run smoothly to the work ; and on Friday Oliver 
Sellers, who, when he opened a throttle, blew miles 
over the tender like feathers, took the 1012, groomed 
like a Wilkes mare, down to Piedmont for the run 
up to the Bend. 

Now Oliver Sellers was a runner in a thousand. 


The Yellow Mail Story 341 

and steady as a clock ; but he had a fireman who 
could n’t stand prosperity, Steve Horigan, a cousin 
of Johnnie’s. The glory was too great for Steve, 
and he spent Friday night in Gallagher’s place cele- 
brating, telling the boys what the 1012 would do to 
the Yellow Mail. Not a thing, Steve claimed after 
five drinks, but pull the stamps clean olF the letters 
the minute they struck the foot-hills. But when 
Steve showed up at five a.m. to superintend the 
movement, he was seasick. The minute Sellers set 
eyes on him he objected to taking him out. Mr. 
Sellers was not looking for any unnecessary chances 
on one of Bucks’s personal matters, and for the gen- 
eral manager the Yellow Mail test had become ex- 
ceedingly personal. Practically everybody East and 
West had said it would fail ; Bucks said no. 

Neighbor himself was on the Piedmont platform 
that morning, watching things. The McCloud de- 
spatchers had promised the train to our division on 
time, and her smoke was due with the rise of the 
sun. The big superintendent of Motive Power, 
watching anxiously for her arrival, and planning anx- 


Held for Orders 


342 

iously for her outgoing, glared at the bunged fireman 
in front of him, and, when Sellers protested. Neigh- 
bor turned on the swollen Steve with sorely bitter 
words. Steve swore mightily he was fit and could 
do the trick — but what ’s the word of a railroad 
man that drinks? Neighbor spoke wicked words, 
and while they poured on the guilty Steve’s crop 
there was a shout down the platform. In the east 
the sun was breaking over the sandhills, and below 
it a haze of black thickened the horizon. It was 
McTerza with the 808 and the Yellow Mail. 
Neighbor looked at his watch ; she was, if anything, 
a minute to the good, and before the car tinks could 
hustle across the yard, a streak of gold cut the sea 
of purple alfalfa in the lower valley, and the nar- 
rows began to smoke with the dust of the race for 
the platform. 

When McTerza blocked the big drivers at the 
west end of the depot, every eye was on the new 
equipment. Three standard railway mail cars, done 
in varnished buttercup, strung out behind the siz- 
zling engine, and they looked pretty as cowslips. 


The Yellow Mail Story 343 

While Neighbor vaguely meditated on their beauty 
and on his boozing fireman, Jimmie Bradshaw, just 
in from a night run down from the Bend, walked 
across the yard. He had seen Stev« Horigan 
making a sneak ” for the bath-house, and from 
the yard gossip Jimmie had guessed the rest. 

‘‘ What are you looking for. Neighbor ? ” asked 
Jimmie Bradshaw. 

‘‘ A man to fire for Sobers — up. Do you want 
it ? ” 

Neighbor threw it at him cross and carelessly, 
not having any idea Jimmie was looking for trouble. 
But Jimmie surprised him; Jimmie did want it. 

“ Sure, I want it. Put me on. Tired ? No. 
I’m fresh as rainwater. Put me on. Neighbor; 
I ’ll never get fast any other way. Doubleday 
would n’t give me a fast run in a hundred years. 

“Neighbor,” cried Jimmie, greatly wrought, “ put 
me on, and I ’ll plant sunflowers on your grave.” 

There was n’t much time to look around; the 
1012 was being coupled on to the mail for the 
hardest run on the line. 


Held for Orders 


344 

Get in there, you blamed idiot,” roared Neigh- 
bor presently at Jimmie. “Get in and fire her; 
and if you don’t give Sobers two hundred and ten 
pounds every inch of the way I ’ll set you back 
wiping.” 

Jimmie winked furiously at the proposition while 
it was being hurled at him, but he lost no time 
climbing in. The 1012 was drumming then at her 
gauge with better than two hundred pounds. Adam 
Shafer, conductor for the run, ran backward and for- 
ward a minute examining the air. At the final word 
from his brakeman he lifted two fingers at Sobers; 
Oliver opened a notch, and Jimmie Bradshaw stuck 
his head out of the gangway. Slowly, but with 
swiftly rising. speed, the yellow string began to move 
out through the long lines of freight cars that 
blocked the spurs ; and those who watched that 
morning from the Piedmont platform, thought a 
smoother equipment than Bucks’s mail train never 
drew out of the mountain yards. 

Jimmie Bradshaw jumped at the work in front 
of him. He had never lifted a pick in as swell 


The Yellow Mail Story 345 

a cab. The hind end of the 1012 was big as 
a private car; Jimmie had never seen so much 
play for a shovel in his life, and he knew the trick 
of his business better than most men even in 
West End cabs, the trick of holding the high pres- 
sure every minute, of feeling the drafts before they 
left the throttle ; and as Oliver let the engine out 
very, very fast, Jimmie Bradshaw sprinkled the 
grate bars craftily and blinked at the shivering 
pointer, as much as to say, “ It ’s you and me now 
for the Yellow Mail, and nobody else on earth.’’ 

There was a long reach of smooth track in 
front of the foothills. It was there the big start 
had to be made, and in two minutes the bark of 
the big machine had deepened to a chest tone full 
as thunder. It was all fun for an hour, for two 
hours. It was that long before the ambitious fire- 
man realized what the new speed meant : the sick- 
ening slew, the lurch on lurch so fast the engine 
never righted, the shortened breath along the tang- 
ent, the giddy roll to the elevation and the sud- 
den shock of the curve, the roar of the flight on 


346 Held for Orders 

the ear, and, above and over it all, the booming 
purr of the maddened steel. The canoe in the 
heart of the rapid, the bridge of a liner at sea, the 
gun in the heat of the fight, take something of 
this — the cab of the mail takes it all. 

When they struck the foothills Sollers and Jim- 
mie Bradshaw looked at their watches and looked 
at each other like men who had turned their backs 
on every mountain record. There was a stop 
for water, speed drinks so hard, an oil round, an 
anxious touch on the journals; then the Yellow 
Mail drew reeling into the hills. Oliver eased 
her just a bit for the heavier curves, but for all 
that the train writhed frantically as it cut the seg- 
ments, and the men thought, in spite of them- 
selves, of the mountain curves ahead. The worst 
of the run lay ahead of the pilot, because the art 
in mountain running is not' alone or so much in 
getting up hill ; it is in getting down hill. But 
by the way the Yellow Mail got that day up hill 
and down, it seemed as if Steve Horigan’s dream 
would be realized, and that the 1012 actually 


The Yellow Mail Story 347 

would pull the stamps off the letters. Before they 
knew it they were through the gateway, out into 
the desert country, up along the crested buttes, and 
then, sudden as eternity, the wheel-base of the 
1012 struck a tight curve, a pent-down rail sprang 
out like a knitting-needle, and the Yellow Mail 
shot staggering off track into a gray borrow-pit. 

There was a crunching of truck and frame, a 
crashing splinter of varnished cars, a scream from 
the wounded engine, a cloud of gray ash in the 
burning sun, and a ruin of human effort in the 
ditch. In the twinkle of an eye the mail train lay 
spilled on the alkali j for a minute it looked des- ' 
perate bad for the general manager’s test. 

It was hardly more than a minute ; then like 
ants out of a trampled hill men began crawling 
from the yellow wreck. There was more — there 
was groaning and worse, yet little for so frightful 
a shock. And first on his feet, with no more 
than scratches, and quickest back under the cab 
after his engineer, was Jimmie Bradshaw, the 
fireman, 


348 Held for Orders 

Sellers, barely conscious, lay wedged between 
the tank and the footboard. Jimmie, all by him- 
self, eased him away from the boiler. The 
conductor stood with a broken arm directing his 
brakeman how to chop a crew out of the head 
mail car, and the hind crews were getting out un- 
aided. There was a quick calling back and forth, 
and the cry, “ Nobody killed ! ’’ But the engineer 
and the conductor were put out of action. There 
was, in fact, only one West End man unhurt — 
Jimmie Bradshaw. 

The first wreck of the fast mail, there have been 
worse since, took place just east of Crockett’s sid- 
ing. A west-bound freight lay at that moment 
on the passing track waiting for the mail. Jimmie 
Bradshaw, the minute he righted himself, cast up the 
possibilities of the situation. Before the freight 
crew had reached the wreck Jimmie was hustling 
ahead to tell them what he wanted. The freight 
conductor demurred; and when they discussed it 
with the freight engineer, Kingsley, he objected. 

My engine won’t never stand it ; it ’ll pound her 


The Yellow Mail Story 349 

to scrap/’ he argued. “ I reckon the safest thing 
to do is to get orders.” 

“ Get orders ! ” stormed Jimmie Bradshaw, 
pointing at the wreck. “ Get orders ! Are you 
running an engine on this line and don’t know the 
orders for those mail bags ? The orders is to move 
’em! That’s orders enough. Move ’em ! Un- 
couple three of those empty box-cars and hustle 
’em back. By the Great United States I any man 
that interferes with moving this mail will get his 
time, that ’s what he ’ll get. That ’s Doubleday, 
and don’t you forget it. The thing is to move the 
mail, not to stand here chewing about it ! ” 

Bucks wants the stuff hustled,” put in the 
freight conductor, weakening before Jimmie’s elo- 
quence, everybody knows that.” 

“ Uncouple there I ” cried Jimmie, climbing into 
the mogul cab. “ I ’ll pull the bags, Kingsley ; 
you need n’t take any chances. Come back 
there, every mother’s son of you, and help on the 
transfer.” 

He carried his points with a gale. He was con- 


Held for Orders 


35 ° 

ductor and engineer and general manager all in 
one. He backed the boxes to the curve below 
the spill, and set every man at work piling the mail 
from the wrecked train to the freight cars. The 
wounded cared for the wounded, and the dead 
might have buried the dead ; Jimmie moved the 
mail. Only one thing turned his hair gray ; the 
transfer was so slow, it threatened to defeat his plan. 
As he stood fermenting, a stray party of Sioux bucks 
on a vagrant hunt rose out of the desert passes, and 
halted to survey the confusion. It was Jimmie 
Bradshaw’s opportunity. He had the blanket men 
in council in a trice. They talked for one minute ; 
in two, he had them regularly sworn in and carry- 
ing second-class. The registered stuff was jealously 
guarded by those of the mail clerks who could still 
hobble — and who, head for head, leg for leg, and 
arm for arm, can stand the wrecking that a mail 
clerk can stand ? The mail crews took the regis- 
tered matter; the freight crews and Jimmie, dripping 
sweat and anxiety, handled the letter-bags ; but sec- 
pnd and third-class were temporarily hustled for the 


The Yellow Mail Story 351 

Great White Father by his irreverent children of 
the Rockies. 

Before the disabled men could credit their senses 
the business was done, they made as comfortable 
as possible, and, with the promise of speedy aid 
back to the injured, the Yellow Mail, somewhat 
disfigured, was heading again westward in the box- 
cars. This time Jimmie Bradshaw, like a dog with 
a bone, had the throttle. Jimmie Bradshaw for 
once in his life had the coveted fast run, and till 
he sighted Fort Rucker he never for a minute let 
up. 

Meantime, at Medicine Bend, there was a des- 
perate crowd around the despatcher. It was an 
hour and twenty minutes after Ponca Station re- 
ported the Yellow Mail out, before P'ort Rucker, 
eighteen miles west, reported the box-cars and 
Jimmie Bradshaw in, and followed with a wreck 
report from the Crockett siding. When that end 
of it began to tumble into the Wickiup office 
Doubleday’s face turned hard ; fate was against 
him, the contract gone glimmering, and he did n’t 


Held for Orders 


352 

feel at all sure his own head and the roadmaster’s 
would n’t follow it. Then the Rucker operator 
began again to talk about Jimmie Bradshaw, and 
“ Who ’s Bradshaw ? ” asked somebody ; and Ruc- 
ker went on excitedly with the story of the mogul 
and of three box-cars, and of a war party of Sioux 
squatting on the brake-wheels ; it came so mixed 
that Medicine Bend thought everybody at Rucker 
Station had gone mad. 

While they fumed, Jimmie Bradshaw was speed- 
ing the mail through the mountains. He had 
Kingsley’s fireman, big as an ox and full of his 
own enthusiasm. In no time they were flying 
across the flats of the Spider Water, threading the 
curves of the Peace River, and hitting the rails of 
the Painted Desert, with the mogul sprinting like 
a Texas steer, and the box-cars leaping like year- 
lings at the joints. It was no case of scientific run- 
ning, no case of favoring the roadbed, of easing the 
strain on the equipment ; it was simply a case of 
galloping to a Broadway fire with a Silsby rotary 
on a 4— II call. Up hill and down, curve and 


The Yellow Mail Story 353 

tangent, it was all one. There was speed made on 
the plains with that mail, and there was speed made 
in the foothills with the fancy equipment, but 
never the speed that Jimmie Bradshaw made when 
he ran the mail through the gorges in three box- 
cars; and frightened operators and paralyzed sta- 
tion agents all the way up the line watched the 
fearful and wonderful train, with Bradshaw’s red 
head sticking out of the cab window, shiver the 
switches. 

Medicine Bend could n’t get the straight of it over 
the wires. There was an electric storm in the 
mountains, and the wires went bad in the midst of 
the confusion. They knew there was a wreck, and 
understood there was mail in the ditch, and, with 
Doubleday frantic, the despatchers were trying to 
get the track to run a train down to Crockett’s. But 
Jimmie Bradshaw had asked at Rucker for rights to 
the Bend, and in an unguarded moment they had 
been given ; after that it was all off. Nobody could 
get action on Jimmie Bradshaw. He took the 
rights, and stayed not for stake nor stopped not for 

23 


Held for Orders 


354 

Stone. In thirty minutes the operating department 
were wild to kill him, but he was making such time 
it was concluded better to humor the lunatic than to 
hold him up anywhere for a parley. When this 
was decided Jimmie and his war party were already 
reported past Bad Axe, fifteen miles below the Bend 
with every truck on the box-cars smoking. 

The Bad Axe run to the Bend was never done in 
less than fourteen minutes until Bradshaw that day 
brought up the mail. Between those two points the 
line is modeled on the curves of a ram’s horn, but 
Jimmie with the mogul found every twist on the 
right of way in eleven minutes ; that particular 
record is good yet. Indeed, before Doubleday, then 
in a frenzied condition, got his cohorts fairly on the 
platform to look for Jimmie, the hollow scream of 
the big freight engine echoed through the mountains. 
Shouts from below brought the operators to the upper 
windows ; down the Bend they saw a monster loco- 
motive flying from a trailing horn of smoke. As the 
stubby string of freight cars slewed quartering into 
the lower yard, the startled officials saw them from 


The Yellow Mail Story 355 

the Wickiup windows wrapped in a stream of flame. 
Every journal was afire, and the blaze from the 
boxes, rolling into the steam from the stack, curled 
hotly around a bevy of Sioux Indians, who clung 
sternly to the footboards and brake-wheels on top 
of the box-cars. It was a ride for the red men that 
is told around the council fires yet. But they do 
not always add in their traditions that they were 
hanging on, not only for life, but likewise for a butt 
of plug tobacco promised for their timely aid at 
Crockett siding. 

By the time Jimmie slowed up his astounding 
equipment the fire brigade was on the run from the 
roundhouse. The Sioux warriors climbed hastily 
down the fire escapes, a force of bruised and bare- 
headed mail clerks shoved back the box-car doors, 
the car tinks tackled the conflagration, and Jimmie 
Bradshaw, dropping from the cab with the swing 
of a man who has done a trick, waited at the gang- 
way for the questions to come at him. For a 
minute they came hot. 

“ What the blazes do you mean by bringing in 


356 Held for Orders 

an engine in that condition ? ’’ choked Doubleday, 
pointing to the blown machine. 

“ I thought you wanted the mail ? ” winked 
Jimmie. 

“ How the devil are we to get the mail with you 
blocking the track two hours ? ” demanded Cal- 
lahan, insanely. 

“ Why, the mail ’s here, in these box-cars,” an- 
swered Jimmie Bradshaw, pointing to his bobtail 
train. “ Now don’t look daffy like that ; every 
sack is right here. I thought the best way to get 
the mail here was to bring it. Hm ? We’re 
forty minutes late, ain’t we ? ” 

Doubleday waited to hear no more. Orders 
flew like curlews from the superintendent and the 
master mechanic. They saw there was a life for 
it yet. Before the fire brigade had done with the 
trucks a string of new mail cars was backed 
down beside the train. The relieving mail crews 
waiting at the Bend took hold like cats at a pudding, 
and a dozen extra men helped them sling the 
pouches. The 1014, blowing porpoisewise, was 


The Yellow Mail Story 357 

backed up just as Benedict Morgan’s train pulled 
down for Crockett’s siding, and the Yellow Mail, 
rehabilitated, rejuvenated, and exultant, started up 
the gorge for Bear Dance, only fifty-three minutes 
late with Hawksworth in the cab. 

‘‘ And if you can’t make that up, Frank, you ’re 
no good on earth,” sputtered Doubleday at the 
engineer he had put in for that especial endeavor. 
And Frank Hawksworth did make it up, and the 
Yellow Mail went on and olF the West End on the 
test, and into the Sierras for the coast, ON TIME. 

“ There ’s a butt of plug tobacco and transpor- 
tation to Crockett’s coming to these bucks, Mr. 
Doubleday,” wheezed Jimmie Bradshaw uncer- 
tainly, for with the wearing off of the strain came 
the idea to Jimmie that he might have to pay for 
it himself. “ I promised them that,” he added, 
“ for helping with the transfer. If it had n’t been 
for the blankets we would n’t have got off for 
another hour. They chew Tomahawk, rough and 
ready preferred, Mr. Doubleday. Hm? ” 
Doubleday was looking ofF into the yard. 


Held for Orders 


358 

“You’ve been on a freight run some time, Jim- 
mie,” said he tentatively. 

The Indian detachment was crowding in pretty 
close on the red-headed engineer. He blushed. 
“ If you ’ll take care of my tobacco contract. 
Doubleday, we ’ll call the other matter square. 
I ’m not looking for a fast run as much as I 
was.” 

“ If we get the mail contract,” resumed Double- 
day reflectively, “ and it won’t be your fault if we 
don’t — hm ? — we may need you on one of the 
runs. Looks to me as if you ought to have one.” 

Jimmie shook his head. “ I don’t want one, 

J 

don’t mind me ; just fix these gentlemen out with 
some tobacco- before they scalp me, will you ” 

The Indians got their leaf, and Bucks. got his 
contract, and Jimmie Bradshaw got the pick of the 
runs on the Yellow Mail, and ever since he’s been 
kicking to get back on a freight. But they don’t 
call him Bradshaw any more. No man in the 
mountains can pace him on a run. And when the 
head brave of the hunting party received the butt 


The Yellow Mail Story 359 

of tobacco on behalf of his company, he looked at 
Doubleday with dignity, pointed to the sandy en- 
gineer, and spoke freckled words in the Sioux. 

That ’s the way it came about. Bradshaw holds 
the belt for the run from Bad Axe to Medicine 
Bend ; but he never goes any more by the name 
of Bradshaw. West of McCloud, everywhere up 
and down the mountains, they give him the name 
the Sioux gave him that day — Jimmie the Wind. 


THE END 





3 




. 







* ^ 


« ■ t 


^ I 


I ( 


r 



u 

w 


4 

« 


i 


9^ 

» 



/ 




« 






4 



r^- * • 


♦ •■ 


« 






« 


I 

> 


‘V 


i 

4 


* ‘ 9 


< 

> 








/• 




,v ' 


V 



w • 

' l’ 




« 




I 


♦ 



i 




9 


t 



e. 


1 


V 


f 


r- * 



1 


V 


•t. • 


* • . 


4 


4 



4 


i 






I 




»• 


^ 4 


L 


\ 

f 


1 




b 


4 • 


t 





• T 

^ 


« 


» 


V 


V 




I 


'■. I. 



* 


*. *' 


■ 


t 


i 


V 




V 



. i- 



I 


r 


4 


M « 


y 


i < 




> 




4 


r- 








ti'M'. i rlA- .l-fl'l?;? H. H'!'.’?S;i;IiJ;4aift 

'•.' .* '■, ■'■•■'. - ' .' T'-; ^ 

' “ ® Ak * • Ij' %J 4 *. » . » • ^ * * ^ ^■' ' j • • • - ‘ .^' 

V.i . •, '. .. ' 

■rf • ' • • \ • ' . •• -.i- *ffl . 




mi - •• . ^' ; • ‘ " v- 

k if .v ■• _I '»■ ' • ; 1 ‘ *' L-r • 

.• ^ '• ■■ 7:.,- ■’ '/V ,- '-■ ■ ' 

.•-' ' v. . \* . . ‘•.*- . ' 1" , .-.'.,^y»-. , •, 'v.'^ ■ '^■— V*' *^ ■» ■ '• -'■ 

' • ' “/ }^. •- ' • />'••.•■■ 'A - ■• ■ ’ .- ^ ■ i' • ' ■ ••• ■ ’- ' ' ' •'■ • ' -’•: 


‘ '■ J, . ■- ''-i 

“4 •».»,,* '\/ .• * 

• A • . • 




- 

Ijbll* *’. • ■• i- *^ ' y 

' '-r ' , 

't'’ . V- ; •, 

• ‘‘^r.nrut' ' 


•' 'H. 

• ' k » V ’ 

r* J • 

'' :'* ■■■.* '-f- * r 

t -. 'V •.I > 

■: . ' V/ •’ • * ... V: ^ . 

1 . “ ■ 


> * 

. ' * '*.• 
• •. . J .i 

-*.v 


» /I* J 

^ .O .■* 





;.'v:h . 


i. 


\ 


✓ 


»» 4L 

» j • - • 


't 


t/ 

4 . . - 


,- ' . 

■ 1 •# 


\ . 


'I 


.. .»' • 


\ 


vv- V ^-. •• 

’ P ’*' ' * 


u 


4 

• *_ 


■ .M *. .<?W 


- - #' 


^ • •• -^yyj ^ 

.• ^ ,. f . i.* 




t 

P 




• » t, ✓ • 


-•v • , j,#. 

j. V* V / 

y P- ■ 


I 


‘ i 


> 





.» I • t 
> * 


k • 


f ♦ 


• • 


A 


' ' tdi 


V .. 


r-,'' 


-V . 
<• . • • 


fMrlilrJk ■ 


I 



T. 

1 f 


c. 


** 


. f 


,« i 


V ; - ^ 


• # 




■V IN?' Mi 

■‘t/' 

/ 


t 


4*1 

•>< > •• 
< ' V 








« 

* 1 * • 


4 * 

w 


'". ,v ’;->l.'> ' S' 


• ' 


S' 


-'t; V' 




